The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 616
wildly negative. In other words, they say that producing ethanol to replace gasoline is a waste of time. They say it takes more energy to make ethanol than
the amount of energy that the ethanol will put out. Moreover, their studies claim
that ethanol is far more environmentally hazardous than anyone ever thought,
and that it might even cause greater pollution than gasoline.
As I implied a bit earlier, the Pimentel-Patzek studies were hatchet jobs because they calculated in extraneous materials, they under-estimated crop
yields, they over-estimated other aspects of farming (either intentionally or because the information they used was out-of-date), they exaggerated possible
worst-case agricultural scenarios, they created deceptive algorithms to calculate and compare statistics, and they purposely ignored certain other aspects
of oil refining and gasoline production that make gasoline EROEI horribly negative.
Perhaps the most shocking item that Pimentel and Patzek left out in their gasoline EROEI calculations are the hundreds of thousands of American military
personnel (past and future) who were killed or wounded to protect and defend
the oil industry’s status quo. I’m sure they never calculated in the cost of continually treating those service personnel who sustained long-term and lifelong
injuries. Then there are the accidental deaths of oil industry workers (past and
future). Then there’s the destruction of beaches, and the loss of employment
for those non-oil industry workers who live near the oil disasters, and then – as
in the case of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco – the destruction of millions(?) of birds
and fish.
Then you’d have to figure in all the energy expended in making every bullet,
every gun, every tank and cannon and jet and ship and pair of shoes worn by
our men and women who are being used to protect the oil industry. These are
all a part of the cost of doing business oil-style.
Okay, okay, I’m not playing fair; I’m using tragically true but typically side-line
aspects of oil EROEI. Of course, I don’t know how you can overlook the deaths
of thousands of Americans, but the oil industry does. I should be comparing
apples with apples, even though Pimentel and Patzek used bad information and
irrelevant factors, such as farming equipment that is unnecessary.
See, one of the things that Pimentel and Patzek did was to try and reinvent the
wheel, so to speak, even though the wheel has been with us for thousands of
years. Here’s what I mean; they started with a zero-based budget as if America
had no farmers. They even calculated into the energy equation the energy required to build some of the equipment that’s used in farming. Not only were the
