In The News- The War on Oil
Lee Emmerich Jamison
It was a long session writing yesterday's entry so I didn't get a look at the news until late, meaning that if you want to see Vinod Khosla's article on alternatives to oil and the energy and political rationales for pursuing them you'll have to find a print version of yesterday's (Tuesday, Jan. 23) Wall Street Journal and go to the editorial page. I can't claim, because I don't have the readership, that others are hopping on my bandwagon. Compare Khosla's article with "An Inexclusive Truth" from Jan. 19th, though, and you'll see other minds interested in the same sorts of things.
Khosla brings out one area of discussion I missed. We should pay a good deal of attention to the need to look at the energy situation as an opportunity to improve agricultural practices through rotations of cash crops. Switch grass and miscanthus grass are both prodigious producers of cellulose. They are particularly suited to the production of ethanol without corn's requirement for the burning of natural gas in distillation. This grants to farmers cash crops which can be rotated with corn, reducing the risk of economic failure in a whole region due to disease or weather. (The grasses need not be mature to ferment if they are damaged, and they will be immune to most of the diseases of corn.)
Furthermore, from other sources I know, because the lignin that remains in the grasses after fermentation can be used as fuel for distillation, ethanol made from switchgrass and miscanthus yields a zero net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. This is not true of ethanol made from corn.
When we buy foreign oil we pay for the terrorism of the Middle East and we empower little despots-to-be like Hugo Chavez. You don't need to believe in Global Warming to think that's a very bad situation.
Khosla has posted essentially the same article at-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vinod-khosla/president-bush-please-de_b_39326.html
