Is ethanol a sound "green" strategy?

Question

Is ethanol a sound "green" strategy?

Answer 1

the cheapest way to produce ethanol is from sugar cane.Brazil has been doing it for almost 20 years, and their cars drive on a mixture of gasoline and ethanol. I believe that after 20 years they know what they do, and although sugar cane causes some pollution, it is definitely a green fuel.

But in Brazil they cut down the rain forest in order to increase production of sugar cane, and that is a clear negative contribution to global warming

But the attempt to produce ethanol from other sources, not sugar canes, is more expensive and requires more energy.

Answer 2

Not at present, nor likely to be in the near future. Maybe not at all. Using current methods, it takes more engery input to produce a given quantity of Ethanol than that same quantity can yield. That's like saying each time you give me $1.25 I'll give you $1.00.

My personal "green strategy" is to use less energy of every kind. It's as good for the pocket book as it is for the environment.

Besides, I'd rather feed the people with grain than feed them oil.

Answer 3

Depends on how you are getting it, ethanol from corn is certainly not. But possibly from sugarcane or sorghum may be.

Bio-diesel from Waste veggie oil or plants like Jatropha is much better.

Answer 4

In the U.S., the production of ethanol emits more carbon than with oil. The production process also emits gases that form smog.

If you use ethanol, you're gas mileage will go down. Any way you look at it, ethanol is a horrible idea for the environment and the economy. The only reason it's profitable for producers is due to huge government subsidies.

Answer 5

No, ethanol is not a "green" strategy.  It is simply a gift to the farming lobby.  Here's why.

To make ethanol out of corn, you need to use a lot of fertilizers to grow that corn.  The replacement crop for corn is soybeans, and these require much less fertilizer to grow than corn does.  Anyways, to make all this fertilizer, it's quite an energy intensive process, using a lot of natural gas (fossil fuel).  Also the increased use of fertilizers is starting to harm the environment.  It has been observed that all the runoff from these chemicals has entered the watershed of the Mississippi river, and flowed down out into the Gulf of Mexico, causing a large "dead zone" where literally there is no life in that part of the ocean because the chemicals killed everything.

All of this using corn to power our cars has also cause food prices to spike, but that's another topic!

Answer 6

Nope. Although it's green, it's nowhere near energy efficient enough to use or produce. In time that may change, but for now, biodiesel is king of the non-petroleum fuels.

Answer 7

I don't think so, its already come under fire from noted environmentalists who are justifiably concerned over the accelerated deforestation in Brazil and Southeast Asia for the purpose of growing corn to ethanol production.

A story Yahoo posted about a year ago included an estimate that it would take about 16 acres of land to grow enough corn to fuel a typical car for one year.  Now multiply that by the number of cars out there....

Answer 8

From corn it's dubious.  Pretty much a "break even" proposition.

But make it from a hardy crop that grows on poor land (like switch grass) and it will be a winner.  We're moving toward that.

Answer 9

It is time to move away from the oil, they have been delaying it for decades. We do need to look into the better ways to make it take less energy to produce.

Answer 10

Right now ethanol is not a sound green strategy, but we must start somewhere.

The process is changing daily, and we have cut the energy costs of ethanol by a large margin over the last five years.

This makes the newest plants very Green.

Ten years from now the technology will almost certainly be much better, and even more green.

This technology is still in its infancy compared to the 100 year old oil industry.

Answer 11

Not at this time.  

It is however a sound strategy to become less dependent on foreign sources of energy.  

Nuclear energy production would be a sound green energy strategy.

Answer 12

Simply put, NO, and never will be.  Hydrogen is the only truly green fuel.  Burn it and the"pollutant" is water.  What's "GREENER " than that?!

Answer 13

Read this about ethanol production

Only transient Aliens could have approved that.

They are intending to replace most of the indigenous Forrest's in the world ,with mono cultures for the production of Ethanol,

Non sustainable, chemically grown ,heavily irrigated (with water needed for communities)one specie Forrest's,that have only plagues of insects as fauna which are controlled with pesticides.

Killing all bio diversity,in both flora and fauna ,adding to the destruction and extinction of species ,like nothing we have ever seen before.

All in the quest for alternative energy and to save the Environment ,

The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.

"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, an environmental NGO based in Asunción, Paraguay. "We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.

Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms. Oil palm has become the world's number one fruit crop, well ahead of bananas.

Biodiesel offers many environmental benefits over diesel from petroleum, including reductions in air pollutants, but the enormous global thirst means millions more hectares could be converted into monocultures of oil palm. Getting accurate numbers on how much forest is being lost is very difficult.

The FAO's State of the World's Forests 2007 released last week reports that globally, net forest loss is 20,000 hectares per day -- equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris. However, that number includes plantation forests, which masks the actual extent of tropical deforestation, about 40,000 hectares (ha) per day, says Matti Palo, a forest economics expert who is affiliated with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.

"The half a million ha per year deforestation of Mexico is covered by the increase of forests in the U.S., for example," Palo told IPS.

National governments provide all the statistics, and countries like Canada do not produce anything reliable, he said. Canada has claimed no net change in its forests for 15 years despite being the largest producer of pulp and paper. "Canada has a moral responsibility to tell the rest of the world what kind of changes have taken place there," he said.

Plantation forests are nothing like natural or native forests. More akin to a field of maize, plantation forests are hostile environments to nearly every animal, bird and even insects. Such forests have been shown to have a negative impact on the water cycle because non-native, fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Pesticides are also commonly used to suppress competing growth from other plants and to prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality.

Plantation forests also offer very few employment opportunities, resulting in a net loss of jobs. "Plantation forests are a tremendous disaster for biodiversity and local people," Lovera said. Even if farmland or savanna are only used for oil palm or other plantations, it often forces the local people off the land and into nearby forests, including national parks, which they clear to grow crops, pasture animals and collect firewood. That has been the pattern with pulp and timber plantation forests in much of the world, says Lovera.

Ethanol is other major biofuel, which is made from maize, sugar cane or other crops. As prices for biofuels climb, more land is cleared to grow the crops. U.S. farmers are switching from soy to maize to meet the ethanol demand. That is having a knock on effect of pushing up soy prices, which is driving the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into soy, she says. Meanwhile rich countries are starting to plant trees to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide, called carbon sequestration. Most of this planting is taking place in the South in the form of plantations, which are just the latest threat to existing forests. "Europe's carbon credit market could be disastrous," Lovera said.

The multi-billion-euro European carbon market does not permit the use of reforestation projects for carbon credits. But there has been a tremendous surge in private companies offering such credits for tree planting projects. Very little of this money goes to small land holders, she says. Plantation forests also contain much less carbon, notes Palo, citing a recent study that showed carbon content of plantation forests in some Asian tropical countries was only 45 percent of that in the respective natural forests. Nor has the world community been able to properly account for the value of the enormous volumes of carbon stored in existing forests.

One recent estimate found that the northern Boreal forest provided 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services such as absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere and cleaning water. The good news is that deforestation, even in remote areas, is easily stopped. All it takes is access to some low-cost satellite imagery and governments that actually want to slow or halt deforestation. Costa Rica has nearly eliminated deforestation by making it illegal to convert forest into farmland, says Lovera.

Paraguay enacted similar laws in 2004, and then regularly checked satellite images of its forests, sending forestry officials and police to enforce the law where it was being violated. "Deforestation has been reduced by 85 percent in less than two years in the eastern part of the country," Lovera noted. The other part of the solution is to give control over forests to the local people. This community or model forest concept has proved to be sustainable in many parts of the world. India recently passed a bill returning the bulk of its forests back to local communities for management, she said.

However, economic interests pushing deforestation in countries like Brazil and Indonesia are so powerful, there may eventually be little natural forest left. "Governments are beginning to realize that their natural forests have enormous value left standing," Lovera said. "A moratorium or ban on deforestation is the only way to stop this."

This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

© 2007 IPS - Inter Press Service

And it is not very good for the people doing it either

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Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/...