Nothing like burning your food supply for fuel. We know for a fact that since the government here instituted that stupid ethanol program that:
a) It requires more energy to convert the corn to ethanol then you get from burning ethanol
b) If your car isn't made for it, Ethanol will tear up your motor. It also can cause water buildup in the fuel lines which destroys the engine.
c) The pollution from all that fertilizer runoff is a serious problem to the water supply and the fish. The red tide has been getting worse and worse in the Gulf of Mexico thanks to all these farmers along the Mississippi dumping all that ammoniam nitrate on the ground
d) Farmers have foregone planting wheat and opted for corn which is partially reponsible for the high cost of food we are experiencing now. Any wheat based product is up in price. For the first time ever in history the US is importing wheat from foreign countries. That is not good.
e) Farmers have been cutting down forest land on property they own to grow more corn. I know about this because I hunt and I have been reading quite a bit lately of hunters running out of hunting lands in the midwest due to farmers this season just cutting down woods on their property that hunters usually get permission to hunt on.
The solution to the problem is not so hard. The US sits on the worlds second largest oil supply. Geologists just made a huge discovery in N. Dakota called the Bakken Formation that has at least 200 billion barrels of oil. Saudi Arabia estimates it has about 230 billion barrels of oil remaining in reserves to give you a comparison. Then there is the many billions of barrels locked away in shale throughout Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and other states out west.
The US also posesses the largest supply of the cleanest burning extremely low sulfur coal in Utah within the national park Grand Staircase Escalante. There is over 7 billion tons of this coal worth over $1 Trillion dollars that is all locked up thanks to Bill Clinton and a sweetheart deal he made with an Indonesian Conglomerate that happens to own the worlds second largest supply of this coal in Indonesia. The owners of this conglomerate, the Riady family made many significant contributions to Bill in the past and I wouldn't be surprised if Hillary is getting money from them now. Not only could this coal be used for energy generation, it could also be converted to natural gas or gasoline and diesel.
All this and we haven't built any refineries (or nuke plants for that matter) here in over 20 years. We have so many ways we could become completely independent of foreign energy but we just don't do it and it bothers me to no end.
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