The 'Admiral' calls 20 percent U.S. gas reduction impossible
Eric Bolling, known as the Admiral on CNBC's Fast Money, was on Morning Call this morning talking about oil prices. Consequently, he was asked about the President's State of the Union Speech and whether a 20 percent reduction in U.S. gasoline production was possible. He adamantly exclaimed that it was not possible, that ethanol would ultimately have little effect on gasoline consumption, and that the U.S. would be lucky if it could maintain its current gasoline consumption - rather than increase it as the U.S. seems to do year after year. Scary.
While Bolling might be correct, and based on his success he's hard to argue against, I think the U.S. must try. More important, I think it is desperately vital that the U.S. and consumers realize that alternative fuels, other than possibly hydrogen, are not going to be the answer. Fuel efficient technology, namely hybrid vehicles that can evolve into plug-in hybrid vehicles are absolutely critical.
I think it's even more evidence we need a gas-tax to clean energy tax credit policy.
While Bolling might be correct, and based on his success he's hard to argue against, I think the U.S. must try. More important, I think it is desperately vital that the U.S. and consumers realize that alternative fuels, other than possibly hydrogen, are not going to be the answer. Fuel efficient technology, namely hybrid vehicles that can evolve into plug-in hybrid vehicles are absolutely critical.
I think it's even more evidence we need a gas-tax to clean energy tax credit policy.
Labels: Ethanol, fuel economy, Hybrid Vehicles, plug-in hybrid vehicles, tax credits
posted by Dahcredyns at
10:34 AM
7 Comments:
Using ethanol to fuel cars is unrealistic. Consider this, to produce ethanol, you have to grow crops, such as corn. Well, to grow corn you need tractors, delivery trucks, etc. Farming consumes great amounts of energy, and food should be for people, not cars.
O.K., what about cellulosic ethanol?
I've heard that most sources of cellulosic ethanol are already being consumed by animals. So, now it's beef or ethanol?
I've never been a fan of ethanol, even though I think it has some potential, but I think it is more about pork than reality.
Check this out!!!
I think that plug-in hybrids are the answer, if battery technology can grow to get cheaper, more storage, and greater range I think that will be the key
i'm curious about cellulose ethanol... just read a bit about it the other day. could someone point me in a (sane) director?
All forms of new energy need to be developed to meet the increasing demand. That includes ethanol, solar, hydro, nuclear, wind, and more oil and gas drilling. The only thing we don't need is another tax to shaft the poor with.
Ethanol seems like a good short term idea when it comes to substituting oils based fuels. There are obvious advantages, and it probably will be a good contributor to the environment as people will be incentivized to capture carbon from the atmosphere (i.e. through planting and growing corn) instead of releasing it from the earth (through drilling)
However, you still need to burn it and it still will release gases back into the atmosphere. If we are to reduce carbon content in the atmosphere in the long run, we need to keep that captured carbon from returning to the atmosphere by some mean (eating the corn?)
There are two major identified ways for propulsion. (Ok there are others but I will ignore them for the moment) gas/diesel engines and electric motors.
What we really need is to move transportation to electric motors and find ways to produce electricity with no carbon emmissions.
No carbon emissions at this point would mean solar, wind, geothermal, but also Nuclear and Hydro. Both of which have their own environmental problems to address...
We know the internal combustion engine cannot be made free of emmissions and we know that at least partially we can make electricity without emmissions. Should we not be investing huge amount to make electric propulsion available for the next generation of vehicles?
If we did it right, we would have a car like the chevy volt, running on an electric motor, enabled for plugging into the grid and with ethanol as the fuel used for extending its range.
What do you think?
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