Arlene asks, "If we need to cut down on our oil subsistence, and biofuels are out, what should we do?"
A fair question.
When you're in a hole, first thing you need to do is stop digging. We are literally at war over oil because we're using far more than we can supply ourselves from our own territories. The first thing we need to do, therefore, is to stop using so damn much oil.
And the best way to accomplish that is to start using it more wisely, that is conservation.
Conservation is a dirty word in America. We are Americans, dammit, and we will use what we want to use. So bring on the SUVs and other gas guzzling vehicles, air-conditioners set to frigid in the summer and heaters set to tropical in the winter, food shipped thousands of miles out of season, weekend flying vacations to hither and yon. We refuse to use buses, trains, or carpooling; it's beneath us. So what if it saves fuel, we don't care about that. We can always start a war and steal some other countries oil.
One other thing, decades ago, municipalities should have begun demanding that all new homes be equipped with solar heating, in some cases solar electric. That alone would save hundreds of billions of gallons of oil. Of course, if municipalities won't demand it, we could always do it ourselves. If we cared.
There is another point to address — we use a lot of oil to create biofuel.
"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable."
In a study he did with an another professor, he found that:
* Corn requires 29% more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* Wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
And sunflowers require 118% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
The researchers considered such factors as the energy used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix.
The costs associated with environmental pollution weren't considered.
Posted by Deck at June 22, 2007 10:37 AM