The Great Gadfly

Equal and Opposite Reaction

A well known rule of physics is that for every action their is an opposite and equal reaction. Is there ever. Let's take a walk down technology Lane and see how we are doing as a nation environmentally. We could start with ethanol, that gift of the gods to the farmer, the oil companies and the politicians who sing its praises. Ethanol allows farmers to sell for a market rate  corn that they used to discard as unsaleable...or feed to their livestock. Now the dumpster and the herd go hungry as this formerly unusable grain is shipped off to refineries where it is converted into an alcohol that is mixed with standard gasoline to produce a supposedly cleaner burning fuel.

So far this sounds great, doesn't it? Sure it does. Excpet that it is raising hell with the price of feed and that in turn is raising the price of meat. And, now many farmers are raising inferior grains for ethanol instead of the grains they used to raise for food so our bread prices are rising. Pizza is no longer a cheap date. Even better is the fact that to produce one gallon of ethanol requires one gallon or more of petroleum. So, how are we saving oil and easing the energy crunch? We are not. But, everyone seems happy to be burying their snouts in the ethanol trough; farmers, refiners, oil companies and politicians...now there's a marriage for you.

Then there are  hybrid cars...part internal combustion and part electric. They use batteries, lots of batteries in all those environmentally sensitive little cars, big batteries. Forget about how we will dispose of them after their useful lives are expended...and batteries are among the really difficult and nasty things we have to dispose of. Just think about all the nickel that goes into them...torn from the earth in mining operations that make Armageddon look like a walk in the park. In Canada, for example, one of the two largest nickel smelters in the world killed off the vegetation for a hundred or more square miles around the plant with the acid rain it caused and the result was soil erosion so that now over a hundred  square miles of land are bare blackened rock.

This is the Inco mine in Sudbury, Ontario, 307 miles from Detroit and 267 miles from Buffalo, as the wind blows. The Inco mine at Sudbury has the tallest smokestack in this hemisphere...the second tallest in the world and it belches sulfur dioxide at the rate of dozens of tons per day into the atmosphere where the westerly winds carry it down over the United States. The next time some snotty Canadian criticizes U.S. environmental policy ask him about Sudbury, Ontario. And the next time Toyota tells you how clean they are as a company ask them if they but nickel from Inco.

We just are not too bright, we humans. If the congress had the guts to do it, they could save up to fifteen percent of our residential electric use by banning incandescant light bulbs in favor of the readily available energy saving fluorescents. But Congress loves tradition and stupidity is among their oldest and proudest. They could mandate vehicle size by fleet

average, mandate higher fuel economy standards and do all sorts of things to make our energy future more secure. But then they might have to turn down the air conditioning in the Capitol in the summer...or take the summer off and do no harm for three months. Having spoken with various people at the U.S. Department of Energy Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, I can say that it is a widely held opinion among energy experts that the fastest way to save energy and lower energy prices and create thousands of new energy related jobs is to institute serious energy conservation programs now, today. We have the technology; do we have the will?

All for now.