U.S. WATER UNDER PRESSURE AS ETHANOL PRODUCTION SOARS
WASHINGTON, DC, October 10, 2007 (ENS) If U.S. ethanol production continues to rise, the effect on water quality could be considerable and water supply problems could develop, says a new report today from the National Research Council. Increased pressure on local aquifers used to grow and refine corn into ethanol, high levels of nitrogen in groundwater from pesticides and fertilizers, and runoff pollution in streams and rivers are a few of the potential impacts. U.S. Water Under Pressure as Ethanol Production Soars
LOL! That should be a no-brainer; increasing high density mono-cropping almost always negatively impact water supplies. But the ethanol lovers (that’d be for fuel, not fun) never want to listen to multitude of reports that show that:
1) The original “studies” on ethanol fuels were never peer reviewed
2) Simple math shows that ethanol fuels are low efficiency alternatives
There is a simple fact about fuel that most people who are uneducated in science simply don’t grasp: fuel is simply a way of getting energy from the point where it is collected to the place where it’s going to be used. That is just as true of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen of the space shuttle as it is of a Kalahari Bushman gathering firewood.
Gasoline is the way we carry energy around in our cars. It is more efficient for that purpose than running a hose to underground deposits of decayed prehistoric vegetables and dragging it behind the Ferrari wherever we go. That’s why we use it.
In the case of ethanol, we have — for the purposes of further fattening a bunch of rich folks’ wallets — been duped into (or, rather, ill-educated and not asked to approve) provisionally accepting a system that is horrendously wasteful of a number of absolutely critical resources, prohibitively expensive economically, and not even as efficient as gasoline for transporting energy in a portable fashion. It is the worst possible choice we could have made, in terms of simple science and common sense.
Why did we do it? You can’t control and profit from the collection of sunlight, and the rich folks figure the problems surrounding ethanol will be in the future, and that they’ll be able to buy their way out of the disasters it will cause down the line. (The Bush family, for example, recently bought 5,000 hectares in Uruguay, right on top of South America’s largest aquifer. Accident?)