Before passing subsidies for ethanol …
by George SeldesApril 18th, 2007 at 18:16:39
STUDY: HEALTH RISK FROM ETHANOL
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE – A new study out of Stanford says pollution from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases. “Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel that will reduce global warming and air pollution,” Mark Z. Jacobson, the study’s author and an atmospheric scientist at Stanford, said in a statement. “But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which already causes significant health damage.”
The study appears in today’s online edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. It comes at a time when the Bush administration is pushing plans to boost ethanol production and the nation’s automakers are required by 2012 to have half their vehicles run on flex fuel, allowing the use of either gasoline or ethanol.
He found that ethanol-burning cars could boost levels of toxic ozone gas in urban areas, but that Los Angeles residents would be by far the hardest hit because of the city’s reliance on the automobile and environmental factors that tend to concentrate smog there. His study showed that the city would experience a 9 percent increase in the rate of ozone-related respiratory deaths — 120 more deaths per year — compared with what would have been projected in 2020 assuming continued gasoline use.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:19 am
Oh gee whiz! For every idea out there to wean us from our depandance on fossile fuels there’s someone who will come up with a reason to maintain the status quo. And big oil would like nothing better than to keep things as they are. Somehow we must move on with the technology available today. Are bio-fuels the long-term answer? No, probably not. But given the transportation system and technology we have available to us today bio-fuels may be the best short-term alternative. We may have to accept trade-offs in the process. Slightly higher polution levels might be one of them. Meanwhile we need to work toward a future transportation system that’s non-polution, afordable and doable. We can’t get directly to those goals today, but maintaining a 100% reliance on foregn oil as our only transportation fuel alternative is pure lunacy.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:44 am
“Meanwhile we need to work toward a future transportation system that’s non-polution, afordable and doable. We can’t get directly to those goals today, but maintaining a 100% reliance on foregn oil as our only transportation fuel alternative is pure lunacy.”
Noted and agreed–which is why we need to be smart about what we do instead — despite how biofuels have been sold, they are the least likely to help us get off oil, because biofuels are all about seeking to maintain the system we have now.
If we’re serious about wanting off foreign oil, then we need to get serious about rebuilding a rail system that works, electrifying it, and providing as many all-electric options for mobility as possible, from local light rail systems, to interurbans, to cross-country high-speed rail to all-electric town cars. _That’s_ the future that terrifies big oil, not one where people rely on liquid fuels made from fossil fuels.
Moreover, if “we may have to accept trade-offs” like “slightly higher pollution levels,” then the question becomes who is trading what? The poor have to accept the pollution and suffer the health costs so that the rich can keep driving is a more accurate statement of what biofuels will bring us. I don’t think anyone would be promoting this option if the roles were reversed and we were talking about an option that would cause the wealthy to suffer from asthma and shortened lifespan so that the poor could have greater mobility.