The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 617
tractors they selected unsuitable for the job because they were too large and
cumbersome, but they ignored the fact that almost all corn farmers already own
the equipment necessary to grow corn or other products (now you can see
where I was going with my fruit cutting example – if you already had an everyday knife that you use you wouldn’t add in the cost of the knife when you purchased it, nor would you calculate in the time and energy it took for the knife
maker to make the knife). They stacked the deck against ethanol. To be fair,
P&P should have calculated in every aspect that goes into what it takes to get
the gasoline to the pump, and that would have been to add in all of the costs
for war, and every single item right down to the energy it takes to make the
zippers on the pants worn by our military service personnel.
Alright, you have my take on what Pimentel and Patzek did. Consider some
examples of studies that studied the Pimentel-Patzek studies. The first of which
comes from Tad Patzek’s own school, UC Berkeley. It was a study completed
in 2006 after the Pimentel-Patzek studies and it was conducted by UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. Here are some highlights of the results:
Ethanol can replace gasoline with significant energy savings, comparable impact on greenhouse gases
“The analysis, appearing in this week's issue of Science, attempts to settle the ongoing debate over whether ethanol is a good substitute for gasoline and thus can help lessen the country's reliance on foreign oil and
support farmers in the bargain.”
“Dan Kammen and Alex Farrell of the Energy and Resources Group at
UC Berkeley, with their students Rich Plevin, Brian Turner and Andy
Jones along with Michael O'Hare, a professor in the Goldman School of
Public Policy, deconstructed six separate high-profile studies of ethanol.
They assessed the studies' assumptions and then reanalyzed each after
correcting errors, inconsistencies and outdated information regarding the
amount of energy used to grow corn and make ethanol, and the energy
output in the form of fuel and corn byproducts.”
“Kammen estimates that ethanol could replace 20 to 30 percent of fuel
usage in this country with little effort in just a few years. In the long term,
the United States may be able to match Sweden, which recently committed to an oil-free future based on ethanol from forests and solar energy.
Kammen last year published a paper, also in Science, arguing that even
Africa could exploit its biomass to build a biofuel industry that could meet
