a musing julius…

my parents were in town to visit the north american international auto show this weekend (and celebrate my birthday) and we had a great weekend…but one of our main talking points we had all weekend was the american economy, gas prices, and america’s addiction to foreign oil.

i’ve already shared my thoughts on e85 and americas love of anything cheaper than gas (even though ethanol is more expensive.) but here we are, 2008 and despite $3.05 for a gallon of gasoline, we still do not care. here’s a great example of our future:

zero people looking at our future. learning about what could potentially power their vehicle in 20 years. while i didn’t take pictures of it, similar scenes were found around every single alternative energy or advanced fuel hybrid vehicle at the show. while this mazda5 probably isn’t a great example, a new tahoe hybrid (i happen to think the tahoe is one of the sharpest looking vehicles on the road) had zero people around it. lines formed around gas guzzling trucks, sports cars and luxury vehicles. handfuls gathered around a chevy volt. crowds waited to sit in the pontiac g8. (i’m angry its cheaper and has more horsepower than my car…thanks exchange rates…)

anyway…it just shocked me, that no one really cares about these cars. in fact, chrysler’s own research indicates that people will not demand alternative vehicle drive trains until gas reaches $13. man, i hope it doesn’t get that high.

my buddy naim wrote a great article on why he hates e85 today and i felt like backing him up, but in a different way.

e85 is america’s response to bitching about gas prices. yeah, it’s $3. big deal. it’s actually cheaper than that stupid bottle of water you bought today, because you’re too good for tap water. what? don’t believe me. that bottle of aquafina you bought today probably cost $1.49 cents for 20 oz. 20 oz. of gas at $3.05 a gallon costs…wait for it…47 cents. you’re overpaying for your water (WHICH IS FREE) by a dollar. not amazing, a gallon of your bottled water (which is just filtered tap water if you’re buying aquafina or dasani) is $9.53!!!!!!

corn is the lifeblood of the american economy. sadly, u.s. corn subsidies destroy the world. (there is a correllation to u.s. corn subsidies and the destruction of the amazonian rain forest.*) between 1995 and 2004, the government spent $41.9 billion on corn subsidies. taxpayers paid that out of their pockets, to give to the american farmer. yay.

now, i recommend everyone see king corn, which is basically a movie about corn in america. note, most of the corn you see on the side of the road is produced as feed for livestock, and not for human consumption.

now, some of our corn is going to produce ethanol. great, except that using corn for ethanol now makes the supply of corn used for corn-based products such as high fructose corn syrup (which is in everything) go down, making prices go up. allegedly, if the price of high fructose corn syrup were to go up just 1/10th of a cent, it would cost coca-cola $125 million dollars.

corn based ethanol takes a lot of energy to make. in fact, more fossil fuels are burned to create ethanol from corn, than the resulting energy contained in the ethanol. what this means…is that ethanol is NOT renewable. corn itself is renewable, but the process by which it is converted to ethanol is not renewable. we’ll spend more energy than we get, and eventually, we’ll run out of the energy to create ethanol.

sugarcane is a much better source for ethanol, or beets, or switchgrass. but our subsidies, environment and tariffs on imported sugar make growing or importing these things either really expensive, or just not a value proposition for a farmer, who could just grow corn, and always get the government to pay for a large portion of their crop. the government does pay for farmers to grow switchgrass.

anyway, corn based ethanol is a killer. in the end, as naim says, ethanol is a crappy stop-gap to solve the energy crisis. only more efficient energy equations will create a truly renewable energy source. but really, we just need more nuclear power plants.

*u.s. farmers stopped planting soy in lieu of planting corn to collect government subsidies. supply of soy dropped tremendously, causing the price of soy to jump. brazilian’s have taken the opportunity to exploit the mass expanse of land they have tied up in rain forests, to plant soy.