Fiction vs. fact - The auto alliance's ad is deceptive

I don't know of anyone who eats saltwater algae or dead tree limbs.

The left over biomass from biodiesel production however CAN be pelletized and made into feed for fish, shrimp, and crabs. No different than a farmer with cattle who makes hay to feed them.
PetroSun is making 4.4 million gallons of biodiesel/ on 1180 acres of saltwater holding ponds right now in Rio Hondo TX.

http://www.petrosuninc.com/alternative-energy.html

Range Fuels is currently constructing a plant in Soperton GA that will make 100 million gallons/yr ethanol from logging and milling waste.

http://www.rangefuels.com/our-first-plant

If you plant new trees to replace the trees you cut down, and you don't cut forests faster than they grow, you always have forests. If you come in, cut down all the trees and leave, you don't have forests.
Plant 2 trees for each tree you cut down and pretty soon you'll have more forests than you started with. Not too hard to do.

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are at."--------Theodore Roosevelt

We've been waiting 170 years for electric cars to be practical and they still aren't. It's time to do what we can with what we have.

BTW---the end product of ethanol production from corn is DDG--high protien animal feed, the ethanol is just a by product that has to be taken off so that you don't have herds of drunk cattle and pigs, or flocks of drunk chickens or turkeys. The last time I checked, meat, eggs and dairy products are still food.

Exactly. Wetdog, you should Google for:

"The Dangers of Biofuel."

as there are some issues with it that worth some serious consideration..

http://progressivesforgore.blogspot.com/2007/05/gore-warns-of-biofuel-dangers-in...

The first electric car was built 170 years ago. And they still have exactly the same problem they had then. When will you get it through your heads that NOBODY wants a car that will only go 30 or 40 miles before you have to turn around and go home to charge it up again for hours.

Why don't you just tell everyone to get rid of cars and ride bikes? They do what you want.

I want to get rid of petroleum because it is the root cause of most of our problems.

There is no such thing as clean coal.

Ethanol is already being used to control smog in the most heavily polluted markets.
Biofuels do not contain sulpher. Petroleum does.
Biofuels burn at lower temperatures and produce significantly less NOx emissions than Petroleum.

The arguements against vehicles slips in and out of comparisons to total emissions from all sources. This is a fallacy----there is no other country with more cars, even if we do change emission standards, it would take years to see any effect.

We can however change fuels relatively quickly and inexpensively. Diesels can use bio with no modification whatever. Ethanol can be used up to 30% in any vehicle. Flex Fuel cost no more than coventional vehicles to build and they are rolling off of assembly lines now and have been for 20 years. Conversion of non flex fuel cars that have fuel injection(as almost all engines now do for the last ten years or so) is relatively easy, and inexpensive. We can change fuels very quickly and easily.

We need to change to biofuels from petroleum first. Then see what pollution and emission levels are, and if we need to strengthen emission standards, we can do it then. In the meantime, we'll get far more emission reduction and pollution reduction by changing fuels at almost no cost.

Do the cheapest and easiest things first. We need to switch to biofuels anyway for economic and political reasons. Do that and we most likely will not need to worry about pollution problems anyway.

It is not just CO2. It's some very bad stuff for living things. Like the stinky stuff that eats your eyeballs on a smoggy day. Here is a bit from the referenced web site:
---------------- Quote Starts here ----------
But it isn’t only carbon dioxide coming out of today’s cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and minivans. Consider these facts regarding smog-forming pollutants and toxic carcinogens:

New Tier 2 regulations, in effect in 2009, will force reductions in smog-forming emissions. In the meantime, manufacturers continue to sell and manufacture dirty vehicles that are 7 or more times as dirty as the target average for 20095;
Even under the new regulations, the average vehicle will emit more than five times as much smog-forming pollution as the cleanest vehicles, such as the Prius, do right now5;
The dirtiest vehicles made today actually emit 40 times the smog-forming pollution of today’s cleanest vehicles, which include hybrids as well as other conventional and hybrid vehicles5;
Even if every single vehicle on the road in 2009 met the new standards, the fleet of vehicles would still emit 500,000 tons of smog-forming pollution every year6. That’s like 20,000 dump truck loads at 25 tons per load;
In 2020, when more than 75% of vehicles on the road will have Tier 2 emissions, EPA projects that passenger vehicles will still emit more than 85,000 tons of toxic emissions linked to cancer7;
On a cancer-risk basis, this is equivalent to more than 350,000 tons of benzene every year8.

Instead of both sides fighting an advertising war to combat global warming against each other, why don't you BOTH campaign to get us off of petroleum oil and on to biofuels. You will both accomplish your goal and the money spent will go a lot further than trying to fight each other?

Petroleum oil is the enemy--not the vehicles, they can use either petroleum or bio.

It does not matter if vehicles emit carbon dioxide or not. What matters is where the carbon comes from.

If an engine is burning a biofuel, all of the carbon in that fuel was taken first from the atmosphere by the plant that the fuel was made from.
Plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and using photosynthesis combine CO2 and H2O in the presense of sunlight and chlorophyll(what makes plants green) to form sugar. Every other kind of organic molecule is formed from these plant produced sugars. When the fuel is burned it returns to the atmosphere, where it is again taken in by plants and made into sugar in an endless cycle. This is the carbon life cycle and it has been going on for billions of years. Biofuels (made from plants) are part of this cycle. Driving a car with a biofuel is no different in the carbon cycle than riding a horse.
Biofuels do not produce greenhouse gas. With biofuels, the net carbon gain in the atmosphere = 0.

Using fossil fuels(anything dug up or pumped out of the earth) however release NEW carbon into the atmosphere. Net gain carbon in the atmosphere = 100%.

The problem with greenhouse gas emission is not what type of vehicle you use. The problem is what type of fuel is used. Biofuels produce no greenhouse warming emissions. Fossil fuels do.

Biofuels do anything and everything that petroleum does, and they do it better--they are superior fuels. Indy race cars run on 100% ethanol and have for over 35 years because it is better fuel than gasoline---it wins races.

Fossil fuels produce greenhouse warming by increasing atmosperic CO2 levels because the carbon in them was taken out of the ground and released into the atmospere.

We need to change the fuels we are using, not the vehicles that use them. We need to be using biofuels instead of petroleum.

Plants do exactly the same thing that solar panels do. They capture energy from the sun and convert it to a different type of energy. With solar panels, it is electricity---with plants, it is chemical energy.

Biofuels, biodiesel and ethanol, are solar energy in a mason jar.