Wednesday, August 01, 2007

First, a disclaimer or three...

It's a blog, not professional journalism, but like the professional journalists [ought to] do, I'll indulge in a bit of disclosure:

I have opinions. You're entitled to them.
It's why I blog. I make no claims to fairness or balance, but I will sometimes try to back up my opinions with supporting materials, but they'll be supporting materials that I've gleaned from the internet.

Oil, biofuels, wevs.
Whatever carbon-based energy choices you make, I and my family will profit from you, just so long as you continue to burn, baby, burn! We grow the corn and soybeans that go into biofuels and we have ties to the petroleum industry.

I like my anonymity.
Or what little of it I've been able to preserve to this point. This is pretty much the extent of disclosure you're going to get from me.


So, rather than litter the comments to ellroon's ethanol post with lengthy and rambling dissertations, I'll just babble boringly [and perhaps only ocassionally] about ethanol and related subjects here in my own blog.

6 comments:

Steve Bates said...

I like it better when you post about cats... or sex... or cats AND sex. :) But I'll certainly read with great attention whatever you have to say about energy sources that burn.

BTW, I have argued the other side of issues with ellroon before, on her comment threads, and found her a gracious and respectful host (pun intended) for opposing views. She isn't kidding when she says that's part of why she blogs. If long rants on comment threads aren't your thing, you can always post your views here and drop a link in one of her threads.

hipparchia said...

cats and sex may be fascinating, but blogging those subjects, together or separately, isn't much of a challenge.

ellroon is truly gracious, as you can see from her reply to my rant, and has a wonderful blog to top that off, [and that was my plan before you ratted me out], but once i get started on the subject, you'll see why i decided to do it this way.

if ever you thought i couldn't shut up about cats....

ellroon said...

Maybe we should talk about cats and sex creating more kittens that will run the wheels inside our cars... saves energy, costs only kibble, and everybody has fun!

hipparchia said...

can we patent that? i think it could work.

Anonymous said...

Actually, the real problem with ethanol is that it doesn't really solve anything. It's a stop gap measure for when the oil runs out. Nothing that fuels a conventional internal combustion engine is the answer, because the underlying principles of the engine are wasteful and dirty.

If too many resources are expended on extending the life of the internal combustion engine, we will never get out of the hole we've dug.

Consider - we need mechanical force and we keep burning things to achieve it. In addition to waste gases, we end up with waste heat.

There has to be a better way, but we aren't going to find it until we start looking.

hipparchia said...

i dunno....

the waste heat is very definitely a problem, and i haven't got any good ideas on that yet.

burning fast-growing plants actually has some appeal on the sustainability front. the plants take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, we release it back into the atmosphere when we burn them, and round and round it all goes, including the wheels on our cars.

any which way we go, we'll need to intensely recycle, at least with all our present forms. with biofuels, the co2 recycling will at least partially happen whether humans will it or not.

you're right that we need to keep looking.