To hear Al Gore talk about it you’d think using corn as a source for ethanol is a cheap, easy solution to counter the terrible effects of Global Warming. Old Al isn’t being exactly honest here on quite a few levels. First of all there is absolutely nothing man can to do to cause or prevent global warming. It just can’t happen. And second of all, ethanol isn’t cheap and in the long run could very well end up doing far more damage to the environment than the burning of fossil fuel ever could.

Lets go over a few things that you’re not going to hear from the Al Gore crowd. Contrary to anything else you might hear, ethanol is expensive to produce. Corn needs to be planted, grown and weeded. Then is has to be gathered, ground, fermented, distilled and transported. Then, almost all of the water must be removed from it before it can be used as a fuel, otherwise it separates from the gasoline blend, settles to the bottom of the tank, causing the engine to stall. This little problem causes problems in transportation, since it cannot be moved by pipeline and therefore needs to be moved by truck. A lot of energy is expended to get a gallon of ethanol to market, but never fear Al says it’s all worth it.

Now it turns out that once you put that gallon of ethanol in your car it’s just not as powerful as a gallon of gas. The Department of Energy reports that a gallon of ethanol has only about two-thirds the energy content of a gallon of gas. If my Jeep gets 26 miles per gallon of gas, it’s only going to get around 17 miles per gallon of ethanol. Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

Besides not being all that efficient to produce, there is even more of a downside to this whole ethanol from corn propaganda. These high energy inputs (farming, distilling, transporting) combined with the low energy outputs, means it only yields about 34 percent more energy than was spent to make it.

Let’s just get back to the basics and put all the rhetoric off to the side for a moment. All things being equal, ethanol emits about one third less greenhouse gas than does gasoline. All things, however are not equal. One thing to remember is that ethanol is not as efficient as gasoline. Basically, this means that for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you get less energy than you would from a gallon of gas.

So even if a gallon of ethanol produces fewer emissions than a gallon of gas, that gap narrows the more ethanol you burn. A gallon of gas contains 115,000 BTUs of energy while a gallon of ethanol contains 75,000 BTUs. With me so far? So to get the same energy output as a gallon of gas, you need to burn one and a half gallons of ethanol. Now, if you work through the numbers that means that using ethanol instead of gasoline entirely might actually increase the amount of greenhouse gases emitted.

But wait, there’s more. Producing gasoline is actually a very efficient process. Once you’ve found it pretty much all you have to do is to stick pump in the ground, suck it up, refine it and distribute it. A little fact that Gore and his nutty friends don’t mention is the fact that producing ethanol isn’t quite so easy or cheap. Ethanol from corn requires much more intensive working in planting, growing, reaping, fermentation, and distribution. Tractors used in the farming burn gasoline. Some ethanol plants use coal fires to distill the ethanol. Truck not pipelines must be used to distribute the stuff. So every gallon already has burned a large amount of fossil fuel in its production.

How much, you ask? Well, it seems that Cornell ecologist David Pimental has a pretty good idea. His study finds that corn ethanol uses 29 percent more fossil energy in its production than it replaces. And other forms of ethanol produce even more lopsided numbers. Switchgrass uses 45 percent more fossil energy, wood biomass uses 57 percent more. As for biodiesel, soybeans are about the same as corn ethanol using 27 percent more fossil energy, while sunflower plants require a whopping 118 percent more fossil fuel energy to produce than they replace.

What does all this mean for greenhouse gases? What it means is that every gallon of corn ethanol has already had 1.3 gallons of gasoline worth of greenhouse gases emitted in its production. Then, add to that the emissions that still come from the gallon of ethanol, and one gallon of ethanol is actually responsible for the emissions of about 2 gallons of gasoline.

There’s another question that I’m waiting to hear a satisfactory answer to, and that is where is all this corn going to come from? Agronomist Dennis Avery from the Hudson Institute analyzed the land demands for ethanol mandates for the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2006 and here’s what he came up with. In 2005 the U.S. harvested 280 million metric tons of corn, about half the world’s corn crop. Yet, according to the University of Minnesota, even if all of that corn were converted into ethanol, it would displace only about 12 percent of the national demand for gasoline. So this means that if the U.S. were to continue to feed itself and replace 10 percent of the gasoline with ethanol, farmers would need to plant 55 million more acres of corn, above and beyond the 80 million acres that are currently devoted to the crop. That’s roughly the size of half the sate of California.

The next question is; where exactly is all this additional acreage going to come from? The United States’ Conservation Reserve amounts to only about 30 million acres, and most of that just is not suitable for growing corn. So therefore, in order to meet the ethanol demand, farmers are going to have to start clear-cutting forest. But there is another little drawback there. You see, forest-land is of a much poorer quality than cropland since it is steeper, dryer, poorly drained making it low-yielding. It’s reasonable to assume that such forest land would be about half as productive as cropland which would mean we’d need twice as much of it to get the same yield which puts us at 110 million acres of additional land we would need. Now, is there even enough forest to cut down? Privately owned forest amounts to about 80 million acres and most of that is in a climate not conducive to growing corn. Further more the environmental wackos along with the Democrats will most likely not want to authorize use of energy-intensive fertilizers. So, using less effective fertilizers roughly doubles the amount of land needed to grow corn meaning that it’s safe to say we would need around 220 million additional acres. Now all this land clearance also comes at a very high environmental cost. Not only do trees absorb carbon dioxide, but they provide important habitats for wildlife. So is extinction to an untold number of plant and animal species a worthy sacrifice to the god of unalterable global warming?

You see, this whole Global Warming nonsense is getting way, way out of hand. Every nut job Democrat out there is prophesizing doom and gloom while perpetuating the global warming hysteria. They tell us if we don’t heed their warnings it’s all over for Mother Earth. In the words of one the most brilliant scientific minds around, Harry Reid, "Those costs that you don’t see on the bottom line. That is, coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick, its Global Warming, it’s ruining our Country, its ruining our World." What’s really sad is that there are so many morons out there who are actually buying into this Chicken Little drivel. Wise up and think for yourself.