My sister has been researching global warming for a newspaper article and asked me the other day: "The main argument for biofuels has been that they reduce greenhouse gas emissions, right? That's been their little scapegoat, cause I mean come on, how can you say no, right? Wrong."
Here's the research she found from:
"The Really Inconvenient Truths"
Seven Environmental Catastrophies Liberals Don't Want You To Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them
by Iain Murray (senior fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute)
-Ethanol emits about a third less greenhouse gas then gasoline and therefore is not as efficient as gasoline.
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This means that for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you get less energy than you would from a gallon of gasoline -So even if a gallon of ethanol produces fewer emissions than a gallon of has, the gap narrows the more ethanol you burn.
A gallon of gasoline contains 115,000 BTUs of energy. A gallon of gasoline contains 75,000 BTUs. So to get the same energy out output as a gallon of gas, you need to burn one and a half gallons of ethanol. If you work through the numbers, that means that using ethanol instead of gasoline entirely might actually increase the amount of greenhouse gas emitted. And wait. There's more.
"Producing gasoline is actually quite an efficient process. Once you've found it, you simply stick a pump in the ground, suck up oil, refine it and distribute it. Ethanol from corn, on the other hand, requires much more intensive work in planting, growing, weeding, reaping, fermentation, and distribution. Tractors used in farming burn gasoline. Some ethanol plants use coal fires to distill the ethanol. Trucks, not pipelines, must be used to distribute the stuff. So every gallon of ethanol already has burned a large amount of fossil fuel in its production.
A study from David Pimental find that
corn ethanol uses 29 percents more fossil fuel energy in its production then it replaces. Switchgrass uses 45 percent more fossil energy, wood biomass 57 percent. As for biodiesel, soybeans are about the same as corn ethanol, using 27 percent more fossil energy, while sunflower plants require a staggering 118 percent more fossil fuel energy to produce then they replace.
Every gallon of corn ethanol already has 1.3 gallons of gasoline worth of greenhouse gases emitted in its production (plus the actual emissions still to come when the ethanol is used). " [from the text "The Really Inconvenient Truths"]
Therefore, ONE GALLON OF ETHANOL is actually responsible for the emissions of about TWO GALLONS OF GASOLINE.