Using fossil fuels is also just a means of turning sunlight into fuel, it’s just been stored longer.
I do agree that harvesting the sunlight currently hitting Earth (solar panels) makes more sense.
Ethanol=Bad. That’s been my contention since day one. It’s been touted as a way to decrease our demand on foreign oil but since it decreases fuel economy it may actually be increasing our demand for foreign oil. It’s a bad idea implemented by people who can’t recognize it as such.
Ethanol=Bad
I believe the E-85 is a bad idea. But I do like the idea of oxygenaters in the gas. The two leading Oxygenators are E-10 and MTBE. MTBE is nasty stuff…and when it gets into ground water it can contaminate drinking water. E-10 isn’t that nice either…but it’s been proven to break down quicker and not impact drinking water.
I got to agree with most of this bio-fuels argument. They just harvested about 4000 acres of future fuel across the street from me. Honestly, the old cotton fields were much prettier.
This could be one of the most dangerous eco disasters on the horizon. The sugar beet plantations in Brazil are destroying the Amazon basin. When it goes, CO in the atmosphere will rise dramatically and O2 levels will begin to deplete. Forget about global warming, lack of oxygen will destroy us all before the global warming ever gets a chance to. Its not just the Amazon forest that is in danger either, Africa is losing most of its forests too.
Electric cars, maybe the future. I am hopeful that there will be a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion as an energy source, but I don’t see much government funding going toward that. It should be a Manhattan size project because we needed this technology about 40 years ago.
I believe in wind technology as well as solar. The cost of wind power is coming down to economically viable levels, it is getting competitive with other sources in the interior portion of our country. The real roadblock to wind right now is the transmission from the source to the users. The AC grid currently in use causes high losses because of the phase shifts that occur over long distances. The only efficient way to transport the energy is high voltage DC lines.
Solar is not competitively priced right now at over $200/MWHR just to produce, but with so many rooftops going unused, it has potential. And it doesn’t have to take up any farmland, or other lands as well.
Neither Solar or wind will ever provide enough energy to meet our needs. They will always just be supplemental sources. The real solution lies in nuclear power. Fusion would be the preferable type but in the meantime, I think we need to learn to live with the less desirable type, or learn to live like our forefathers did.
You could argue that every form of energy on Earth with the exception of nuclear is driven by the sun. When you burn wood, fossil fuels, tap wind power, etc., all are driven by solar energy. Geothermal energy and energy in ocean tides aren’t directly powered by the sun’s radiant output, but by gravitational forces, which wouldn’t exist without us orbiting the mass of the sun.
@oblivion: Yeah, and fission is just energy from somebody else’s sun.
For accounting, though, I’m counting fossil fuels as “found” energy…certainly biomatter wasn’t ossified with the intent of making fuel in 200,000 years.
All fuels have positive and negative features. It seems to me that we will need them all, and we had better figure out how to use them as efficiently as possible.