Quote:
Originally Posted by Vega
Whoa, whoa, too much E85 bashing here, i wish people would read up on it instead of listening to all of the propaganda surrounding it. Ever notice that anything that has to do with change in America gets a bad rep?
- E85 does not effect the food prices at all, they use feed corn, and they boil what they need off the kernel which (for those of you who have voided your bowls before) is irrelevant to digestion or nutrition anyways, and with the abundance of corn in America its not like we're stealing good cattle feed corn from starving children in Africa, its perfectly harmless.
- E85 does indeed get worse mileage than gasoline, but that is soley because the motor your burning it in is optimized for gasoline, even if it says "E85 compatible" that still just means "compatible" and doesnt mean it was built for that fuel. Motors built for E85 have been proven to get better mileage and horsepower than their gasoline counterparts, it just takes more than an E85 conversion kit to do it.
- E85 would be less expensive if people werent so scared of it, many companies dont want to invest all their money into a product nobody wants, even if most of the reason people dont like it is from propaganda, for them its not about saving the world its about profit, if demand is low they will make lower amounts of it and less interest will promt less development which will keep the prices where they are. If more people were interested they would make more and the price would drop, then development would kick up and they would eliminate the difference between gaslone MPG and E85 MPG.
- E85 has a higher octane so its a better performance fuel anyways. An all-american performance fuel thats better for the environment and potentially cheaper? Sounds like muscle car heaven to me.
- E85 is a renewable resource, which gasoline is not. No matter how much E85 you use there will still be more to be made, keeping the price steady, again supply and demand. Gasoline will continue to rise because it is non-renewable and is becoming less and less scarce.
- Increasing E85 production will put a lot of farmers to work, boosting corn production anyways, and odds are not all of that excess production will go straight to E85 production so in the end foreign countries might even see MORE food coming to them than without E85.
- E85 is a huge economical boost for America, having a self-sustained fuel and a huge boost to farming and agriculture, plus the development and companies that get involved, it would pour money back into the economy, not only would it help your wallet and the environment but it would also help our country as a whole.
- On a personal note, id much rather put a self-sustained American fuel in my American muscle car rather than put oil in it from the middle east. Which in fact have the prices hiked on them cause they know its a necessity for us, not to mention China and all the other countries wanting to buy it as well. Plus all the American oil tycoons who want to raise the price even after the price was raised from the first sellers.
Sorry if i sound a little preachy, and if i seem to have hi-jacked the post, i just get a little ticked when people write things off without looking into it, they just listen to politicians and word of mouth, and im not calling anyone for that but the facts are out there and theyre very interesting especially to us muscle car guys.
Anyways, back to the new Camaro V6 =P
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I don't mean to be a preachy thread-jacker either but I think that deserves a considered response.
Even if farmers don't end up converting large portions of food crop acreage to fuel crops (which if it's more profitable for them they very well may - it's human nature), I have yet to see any analyses which don't admit that producing E85 is more costly than producing gasoline, all for a slighly higher octane rating than what you get with premium gas as it is. That can easily end up raising the price of everything requiring transport from A to B, even if indirectly. Whether it's an intended or unintended consequence doesn't mean a whole lot to my wallet.
Demand for E85 is low because only a fraction of vehicles car use it, not because of "propoganda." The vast majority of people are justifiably afraid of E85 - because it'll destroy their engines! The transportation infrastructure simply isn't designed to use E85, and it's pretty heavy-handed to use very little carrot and a lot of stick to compel privately-owned gas stations to sell an unprofitable product while pressuring drivers to buy new cars compatible with a hurried, manufactured change in that infrastructure. Shoving something down people's throats via regulation from on high is a pretty crummy business model, especially coming from an industry which wouldn't exist except for subsidies as it is.
The environmental benefits of E85 are questionable, at best. Yes, gas produces some nasty stuff like lead (and some stuff like CO2 which is nasty for us but not so much for things which are actually green), but given the choice between breathing in gas emissions and breathing in some carginogen aldehyde emissions from E85 which don't benefit us
or vegetation, I'd prefer neither. However since all-electric vehicles are still pretty crummy (and open up a whole new can of unintended-consequences worms I won't go into), I don't care to buy a new car to adopt a new standard which risks giving me health issues, and I'll stick with gas.
As for jobs, we could create those if we drilled for oil more, as well, without all the hidden costs of a frantic reconfiguration of the country. We can get it from conventional sources like the continental shelf and the Gulf, as well as new sources like coal, oil sands, shale, even from thermal depolymerization (which as an engineer I think is just about the coolest thing ever). As it is we already get most of our gas either from domestic or friendly international sources, namely Canada - they built our Camaros for us so they can't be that bad, right? - and to a lesser extent Mexico. True, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are big contributers but for all the talk of "peak oil", North America is sitting on top of potentially the biggest oil reserve on the planet and it's mostly untapped - we could tell OPEC where to shove it while relying on ourselves and our friends for our energy needs, and probably end up selling a heck of a lot to the rest of the world (leaving our terrorist-funding friends in the Middle East with about the only thing they had before we found oil there... a lot of sand). Imagine the economic security to be found from that. Not to mention it would give us an abundance of time and security to study and develop new alternative energy and fuels that are a real improvement over gasoline and implement them in a more gradual, less authoritarian way.