I just find it funny how much venom people have for Gore, especially if he’s as “do nothing” as they say. I don’t know how many times he’s been accused of saying he invented the internet on these boards – that it’s not true be damned.

BUT, I’d like to know who funded this study, or maybe more to the point, which oil company funded it. Of course it takes more energy to produce ethanol. There’s no such thing as free energy (or they’d have been able to make a perpetual motion machine by now). Obviously, if you just find something lying around and use it, it’s easier than making it from scratch, then using it.

The real benefit of ethanol is breaking our dependence on Arab oil and benefiting someone inside our borders for a change.

So, before you decide to blow Gore you enviro freaks, remember which president increased the CAFE standards or which president created the EPA. All Gore is known for is bull**** talk, and no action. From his record in the Senate, to his record as VP, to his 20,000 sq/ft house, to his SUV driving and private jet flying, to his strip mining family. He’s probably the most environmentally unfriendly “leader” in our nations recent history. But keep on stroking his ego and balls you global warmists.

Batting a thousand indeed. Batting .120 is more like it.

I’ve said before, I’m not an eco-alarmist, but I’ve been exposed to both sides of the global warming argument, and I think Gore’s been most intelligent and scientific in putting his argument together.

I also admire him for his dedication to his cause. I would have put good money on his running for president. Imagine a Nobel Laureate who’s steadily gained in popularity even since he left politics. And keep in mind, when he left politics, the majority of Americans had voted him President. But, he steered clear mostly to keep his focus on spreading his message.

But to champion the opposite side, you have the occasional minimally to moderately informed Lutzes swearing off-handedly to the press, and industry lobbyists citing to high temperatures the year we fought the American Revolution as a preamble to an “Up yours, Gore!….” Industry polluters have everything to gain by making global warming a nonissue. There’s a study or two that may support them, but where’s the consensus?

global_lightning- Where does it say that Brazilian ethanol based off of Sugarcane is more enviromentally friendly?

jdash1- Holds some truth.
There’s a few E85 pumps here in NY, but I know of a few farms that produce it, and you can simply go straight to them.

You have it right. We need to find a better source for ethanol. The problem is getting farmers to grow the stuff, which are essentially weeds, to mow down in order to process into fuel. Those weeds required nothing but space, sunlight, and water, sounds pretty cheap compared to Corn.

But Farmers are not going to if they can get money for planting corn instead of fuel weeds.

The Farm Bill needs to be amended but no one on the hill has the stones to do it.

Transporting it may be hard at first, but not that hard. We’ve been transporting mass loads of Alcohol of on type or another in tankers for decades, nigh on a century at least. Ethanol may require a slight difference in methodology, but it can be done.

It’s best to work it out now while the problem in only looming a ways off, rather than wait until it’s standing on your toes.

Al Gore can not a did not make the policy or push Ethanol. He only sighted, repeatedly and emphatically, that we need to work on reducing, if not reversing, global warming.

Even if he did and does support bio-fuels, he has probably known about this problem long before we did or this article ever crossed LLN’s servers.

He has a larger range of concerns than just Bio-fuels. His goal has been to make people very aware of the problem, which is why we has the articles here and elsewhere, web-wide, to begin with.

Al Gore has been batting a thousand.

He’s not an engineer or a scientist. He did not develop the process to create Ethanol from Corn… He would not have approved of it if he did. What he did do resulted in interest in ethanol, which in and of itself is a good thing even if the process sucks, and this article.

Put the blame where it belongs, the standing politicians who do write policy and dole out the funding for crappy processes in order to make their “fat cat” friends happy.

Not the Farmers. They have enough problems just keeping their farms. They just want to make a living. But lobbyists and those they represent who want more subsidies for Corn, one of the most petroleum intensive crops around.

Cellulosic ethanol is much more appealing, because Amercan mouths don’t have to compete with fuel tanks, but the logistical problems alone of transporting ethanol will make it suspect…. Of course, Brazil is almost as big as the U.S., and they seemed to have made it work….

But for now, I’m more interested in improving fuel economy and hydrogen and improving power generation to support pure-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

This is no big surprise. Too much attention was paid to the end product instead of how it was made. Now more attention is being set on how to make bio-fuels and so they should start getting cleaner quickly.

So are we going to put the blame on Brazil or not?