carbonates

Ethanol Is Dead: How You Can Still Profit From It

Academic arguments about the benefits of ethanol aside, I'm still making money shorting ethanol. Long term who knows? Natural gas could easily become the next big transportation fuel, that is if the demand from corn farmers for natural-gas-derived nitrogen fertilizer, essential for current corn crops, doesn't drive natural gas too high. The Saudis are selling us fertilizer too!

It's Now 'Official': Ethanol Is a Scam

As a geoscientist who studies paleoclimate I have contended for years that the primary cause of global warming is not necessarily greenhouse gases and may actually be changes in land use. Consider how much of the northern hemisphere has been changed from forest to cropland over the last 100 years. Industrial agriculture has dramatically changed the planet, and the problem with both ethanol and biodiesel is that they create a powerful market that encourages more destruction of natural vegetation and converting it to cropland. Also consider that urban and suburban areas are known to create heat island effects. How much heat is absorbed by black roofing material, black road surfaces, etc, that is now radiated out into the atmosphere at night, instead of being absorbed by photosynthesis and used in convection? We don't know because it is very difficult to measure on a global scale. Experiments by NASA done in the Amazon have proven that changing from forest, or even grassland to cropland will cause local warming and reduced rainfall. Our problem is not what we think it is, and this is precisely why biofuels are more of a problem than a solution.