What our starfish brained politicians can’t grasp is how loud mouthed tree huggers and Hollywood bimbos are not good sources of chemistry knowledge. Are SUV’s bad greenhouse juju? Certainly not because of CO2 emissions. But, what about all that water dripping out of the tailpipe when you start ‘em up? Burning a hydrocarbon (gasoline) in oxygen produces CO2 and water vapor. When your exhaust is cold, the water condenses and spits out the tailpipe. When the exhaust system heats up, the water stays in the vapor state. It’s not quite that simple because the fuel has additives and we are burning air which also has nitrogen and other gases besides oxygen. We actually get water vapor, CO2, nitrogen oxides, and whatever nasties the additives turn into. We don’t get complete combustion so we also get pure carbon (soot), carbon monoxide, and other stuff. All of which doesn’t matter since, although we are making tremendous volumes of water vapor, it rarely makes it to the upper atmosphere and contributes to a greenhouse effect.

Now let’s have some fun! Let’s award a prize. The Energy Pretzel Logic award. Just like the Nobel; but different. The prize must be shared by the ethanol crowd and a very gullible public. Let’s all burn ethanol blends because they produce a little less CO2 than straight gasoline. Great idea but it takes more energy to make the ethanol than we get out of it when we burn it. If you are clear cutting a tropical rain forest in your backyard, the economies change a bit. Since we don’t have a handy tropical rain forest, let’s just ferment our food to make ethanol. Ok, we are all fat and don’t need food anyway. This is already twisted but it gets better.

Here’s what they don’t tell you. We make ethanol by fermenting simple sugars like those found in corn. For every molecule of simple sugar you ferment, you get 2 molecules of ethanol and, you might guess it, 2 molecules of CO2.

C6H12O6 > 2)C2H5OH + 2) CO2

I thought we were trying to get rid of CO2! Our solution is to make gobs of CO2 in fermentation so we can have overall inefficient ethanol blend bio fuels so our cars can emit a little less CO2? I’ve seen two UFO’s and a bear riding a bicycle but I never dreamt I’d see something like this. I should have expected it from a society that put a man on the moon before it figured out how to put wheels on luggage.

“have you considered the political bias in the statement “6 people would possess 60% of the entire wealth and all 6 would be from the U.S.”? Do they possess the wealth because it fell out of the sky and happened to land in America. How refreshing it would be if the author had been more accurate and honest and stated “6 people would have created 60% of all wealth and all 6 would be from the U.S.”