Ethanol Lobby Is Perpetrating A Cruel Hoax Ethanol contains water that distillation cannot remove. As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol. The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge. These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines. Ethanol is 20% to 30% less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile. It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank. That's enough corn to feed one person for a year. Plus, it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel — oil and natural gas — to produce one gallon of ethanol. After all, corn must be grown, fertilized, harvested and trucked to ethanol producers — all of which are fuel-using activities. And, it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. On top of all this, if our total annual corn output were put to ethanol production, it would reduce gasoline consumption by 10% or 12%. Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn't make it in a free market. That's why Congress has enacted major ethanol subsidies, about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is no less than a tax on consumers. There's something else wrong with this picture. If Congress and President Bush say we need less reliance on oil and greater use of renewable fuels, then why would Congress impose a stiff tariff, 54 cents a gallon, on ethanol from Brazil? Brazilian ethanol, by the way, is produced from sugar beet and is far more energy-efficient, cleaner and cheaper to produce....
One Cooler Head When new facts emerge, the open-minded tend to alter their views. This is what has happened to a Hungarian environmental scholar whose position on global warming has been transformed. Until his Damascus moment, Miklos Zagoni, a physicist and environmental researcher, had been touted as his nation's "most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol." But then this activist saw the work of a fellow Hungarian scientist. His world was rocked. "I fell in love" with the theory, he told DailyTech.com. Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Langley Research Center with three decades of experience, had found that researchers have been repeating a mistake when calculating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on temperatures. We're not scientists, but it looks to us like Miskolczi found that the Earth does a good job of adapting and self-regulating. As has been noted elsewhere, Miskolczi's theory could explain why the warming that models have been predicting for decades has never materialized. NASA's response to the new results? It refused to publish them, reports DailyTech.com. Miskolczi quit, citing in his resignation letter a clash between his "idea of the freedom of science" and NASA's "practice of handling new climate change related scientific results." The space agency isn't inclined to fund research that refutes the Al Gore view that has eaten away reasoned thinking and been adopted uncritically by much of the public....
Verbatim: Vaclav Klaus On Climate Alarmism Following is the speech delivered by the president of the Czech Republic at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change in New York, March 4, 2008. ...A week ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: "Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical — the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality." What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism. This fear of mine is the driving force behind my active involvement in the Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who in September 2007 at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, only a few blocks away from here, openly and explicitly challenged the current global warming hysteria. My central argument was — in a condensed form — formulated in the subtitle of my recently published book devoted to this topic which asks: "What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?" My answer is clear and resolute: "It is our freedom." I may also add: "and our prosperity."....