I see one glaring mistake in the above show and that has to do with ethanol. Now don't get me wrong, I'm in no way pro-subsidy, but it's the science of ethanol that I contend. As I mentioned earlier this month when ReasonTV came out against ethanol for environmental reasons, there is only one researcher that claims that ethanol takes more energy to produce than you get out of it and that's David Pimentel at Cornell University. His analysis was wrong in several places, including his claim that all corn is irrigated. The majority of corn crop is not. He made several other errors too and his research turns out to be mostly crap. ReasonTV should know that. I'm not at all implying there should be subsidies, but if you're going to use science to debunk it, make sure it's sound. In addition, the CO2 that ethanol puts out mostly came from the atmosphere to grow the crop (mostly corn). So it's not new CO2. Not that there's anything wrong with CO2 in the first pace. Here's what the research says:
Note that there's only one researcher that claims a negative yield. Ethanol production gains about 23% energy over the fossil fuel energy it takes to fertilize, harvest, process and ferment feedstock into ethanol. (the above research has a positive percentage greater than that but there are a few mistakes in some of the positive papers too) The positive energy comes from the fact that we don't have to pay for the crop to grow. Nature does it all by itself.
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