Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Gasoline or Ethanol?

Ethanol is a renewable energy source right? It burns cleaner that gasoline right? Nobody ever complained about an ethanol spill polluting pristine waters after an ethanol tanker ran aground right? We can reduce our dependence on foreign oil by switching to ethanol instead of gasoline right?

These are the arguments I hear from "environmentalists" that want to replace our gasoline with ethanol. There's a few problems with them though.

If (and it's a real BIG IF) global warming is caused by the dumping of CO2 into our atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels how does switching to ethanol fix the problem? When you burn ethanol you get CO2 and H2O, the same as when you burn fossil fuels. You still get CO and a few other things as well, maybe not as much as with gasoline, but the point is, burning ethanol is still going to produce two of the most powerful greenhouse gasses there are, CO2 and H2O.

Sure, growing the corn that is used to create the ethanol will consume some of the CO2 as the corn plants turn CO2 and H2O into sugar. But that's not the only part of the process. When those little yeast cells start converting the sugar into alcohol, guess what one of the byproducts is... That's right, CO2.

How about all the fertilizer used to grow the corn? Where does the runoff go? That's right, into our lakes and streams. More pollution.

Burning ethanol produces energy, it's true. Making ethanol consumes energy. Some of that energy comes from the sun, but there's other energy consumed in the processes. Fertilizer has to be made and transported. Water has to be transported. Most of the corn plant isn't converted into ethanol either. What happens to all those corn stalks? Maybe some of it does get used, I don't really know.

Using corn to produce ethanol to fuel our cars is a bit crazy. The corn that gets mashed and fermented to make ethanol isn't used as animal feed (some of the byproducts might be, but only some of them), and it doesn't go onto the table for dinner either. If we don't increase corn production to offset what we're burning in our engines then there's less food for our animals, or our tables.

And what there is will be more expensive as demand increases. Corn farmers have got to love this scam. I don't though.

Sure, I can afford to pay a bit more for corn. It doesn't stop there though. What happens to the price of chicken when the price of chicken feed goes up by 40%? Do you think the chicken growers are just going to absorb that cost? I don't. I think the price of chicken is going to go up. And so is the price of beef. And leather.

We already put ethanol into our gasoline during the winter, at least out here in the Pacific Northwest we do. Regular unleaded gasoline contains up to 10% ethanol during the winter. That's about as much as your car can handle without modifications. E85 (85% ethanol) fuel is available now at some locations across the country. Your typical car requires modifications to use it as a fuel.

Using ethanol as a motor fuel makes it more expensive to run the motor. Aluminum engines have a tendency to corrode when alcohol is used as a fuel. Alcohol washes past the cylinder rings more easily than gasoline too, resulting in contaminated oil that needs to be changed more often.

Alcohol isn't really that great a motor fuel. A race motor that runs on alcohol needs a special carburetor to handle the larger volume of fuel required to make power. You need almost four times as much fuel to make power with alcohol in a racing motor as with gasoline.

Alcohol does burn cooler though, so you can get much higher compression ratios when you use it as a fuel without having to worry about detonation (pinging). Higher compression ratios are where the power in an alcohol motor comes from. Higher compression ratios also require much more attention to detail when building an engine.

All of this means more expensive engines, and more fuel consumption.

Converting our economy from using gasoline to ethanol is a great idea. That is, it's a great idea if you're a corn grower, an engine builder, or a politician that wants to make points with the environmentalists. It's a horrible idea if you own a car that isn't ready to run on ethanol... or if you eat.

White House sought to fire 93 attorneys

Congress is all up in arms about this, at least Democratic members of congress are. There's going to be an "investigation", after all, this MUST be politically motivated. 

WASHINGTON — The White House suggested to the Justice Department two years ago that all 93 U.S. attorneys be fired, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

So this is unusual how? Didn't President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno do this back in the early 1990's with ALL of the U.S. attorneys?

Isn't the Justice Department part of the Executive branch of the government?

Statcounter vs. Sitemeter

I use both the Statcounter and the Sitemeter site tracking services. I also keep track of the statistics that my ISP provides. Not one of these services agrees with the others.

My ISP tracks every single HTTP request. That's useful if I want to see what images somebody's loaded or if I'm looking to find out what kind of traffic I'm actually seeing in terms of bandwidth, but it's somewhat of a pain to wade through the logs manually. Plus, the logs aren't always up to date, since IIS doesn't flush it's buffers after every write to the log. That means that there could be quite a while before the most recent traffic shows up in them.

Statcounter and Sitemeter are a bit more useful. They only count hits where their code is executed or their static image is downloaded. But they provide a lot of summary and statistical information about the traffic and they geocode the IP addresses too. They also allow me to block specific ranges of IP addresses so that the traffic I see doesn't include me.

I like the way that Statcounter provides some of their breakdowns better than the way that Statcounter does. Some of their reports are pretty useful, and I really like their mashup of the geocoding data and google maps.

I like Sitemeter's graphs somewhat better than Statcounter's graphs, although Statcounter does give you more graphing options. I also like the fact that when you download data from Sitemeter, you get the geocoding data as well. Statcounter doesn't let you download the geocoding data.

What I don't like, about the two services is that they don't agree with each other very well. About two months ago, I reset my Statcounter counter to match my Sitemeter counter. For one reason or another, Sitemeter consistently scores more "hits" than Statcounter. Over two months the counters have diverged by almost 500 hits.

From my personal experience when reading comments or news on my site, Statcounter's counter frequently fails to load. That bothers me a bit. I'm paying for a premium account on both services, and Statcounter is costing me more than Sitemeter, but the service seems a bit less reliable.

They've done some upgrades to their service lately, but I don't know that it justifies the extra cost. One of them's going to go soon. I don't really need both services, so I don't think I want to keep paying for them both.

OTPB Tuesday

This is your open trackbacks post for Tuesday, March 13, 2007.

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