If you will permit my ethanol-fueled ramblings:

I really enjoy this bit. Not only is the music enjoyable, but the visuals emphasize the the lyrics in a subtle, interesting way. We all use the computer. How many times have our minds wandered to thoughts other than those related to the computer. How many of those thoughts have wandered into the territory of obsession?

This is all because of the widespread implementation of ethanol and biofuels. Thanks a lot you fucking environMENTAL assholes. Does it feel good to pollute less? Does it ease your mind driving an E-85? I hope so, because PEOPLE are starving to death across the globe just so you selfish bastards can feel less guilty about the environment.

You know whats really funny? Ethanol is a shitty fuel and it actually creates more emissions than it claims to prevent. Its like turning two gallons of gas into one crappy gallon of gas and calling that conservation.

I agree-ethanol is a goddamn travesty-thank the money-printers(empire), working both sides against the middle-thank the hard-core head-in-ass environmentalists, their rabid lobbying, the media, all complicit-
thank the farmers who are paid to do what they are told.....follow the money, follow the money, follow the money-
Ethanol is a sick, twisted crime against humanity-
Drill for fucking oil, you fucking morons, OR-demand the alternatives from the people that keep them under lock and key to enslave us, and empower themselves-

the reality is this-ethanol makes NO DENT in the world food market-The reason food prices go up and down, and fuel prices go up and down, is because inflation, depression, etc...IS MANIPULATED means of control

How about some Brecht and Weill


What Keeps Mankind Alive?-(1928)

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

>> ^complacentnation:
I still don't understand why so many people hyped Ron Paul when Dennis Kucinich was way better. Especially in terms of free market. A 'freer' market in this country would mean corporations taking shit to the next level. The government should get out of our lives but should better regulate corporate conglomerates. Not having some sort of regulation on business is practically the same thing as economic imperialism!


Probably because they did research and you didn't. What Kucinich, like any regulationist, doesn't understand is that the problems are not rooted in capitalism, but government enabled collusive activity between politicians and business. This can only happen with greater government control of the market. Maybe not with upstanding people like Kucinich, but some politician at some point who is more corruptible. So long as the regulatory power is there, it's going to happen. The idea of regulation itself depends on the person regulating being supremely unselfish and morally upstanding, and that's simply not going to be the case 90% of the time. It also asserts that government officials are prescient intellectuals who can choose the best technologies better than a market outcome. Therefore it is idealistic to expect it to work despite well-intentioned meaning and origin. In the end, all it does is raise prices and stifle innovation. Take ethanol subsidies for example. The government took money from you, and gave it to big corn conglomerates under the pretense that it knew what the best tech was better than a market outcome (that's essentially what a subsidy is). The people are poorer and less able to afford or invest in better technologies, corn-related food and livestock goes up in cost negating fuel savings, pollution stays the same since it takes as much energy to create ethanol as you get from it. Total government fuck-up.

A lot of socialist democrats today in favor of ever bigger government, they falsely blame market greed for the original depression, the cost of oil, CEO wages. I hear it all the time. It is insane to believe the housing bubble, for example, was rooted in spontaneous evolution of man becoming more greedy in the year 2000. That is nonsense. What really happened was centralized control of interest rates, under the same idealist principles which you espouse, in the form of the Federal Reserve, lead to a human being (Greenspan) politically pressured to avoid a necessary correction/recession after the last Fed-created bubble bust in 2000. Rates were forced down to 1% for an entire year, well below where the market would have had them at the time. That created a demand for housing and kept everyone spending, but do you see how that demand was artificial? All the people on Wall Street, they didn't evolve. They've always been greedy, that's what they're there for, to invest in the best sectors and benefit at the same time that their investment is ultimately benefiting us in the form of better products and services that we, the consumer, demand. If a recession was allowed to happen, though, and rates were reflective of the truth, they wouldn't have been incentivized into all that speculative and unsustainable madness. Greenspan actually vocally encouraged that "growth" for years and naturally people gravitate towards optimism and wanting to think something that great will last forever. Naturally, that attracts these ponzi schemes and shady lenders into placed they were not so commonly found before. So the socialist plank of a central bank and central economic planning enables it, and yet capitalism is blamed. Meanwhile, people are talking about giving the arsonist even more firefighting duties. Huh? You can see why we libertarian people are beside ourselves.

Greed drives innovation so long as competition is preserved and government grants no special privileges. If you accept that competition and the fear of competition leads to prices getting bid down in an effort to win the consumer of that product or service, then the last thing you want is government getting involved to erode it with managed trade like NAFTA, health care bills like the HMO act, no-bid contracts, taxpayer subsidies, etc, etc. Government is itself a monopoly, comprised largely of lawyers and very manipulative individuals who engage in some of the most outstanding and convincing propaganda you'll ever see, all the while colluding with their businessmen campaign financiers to return the favor and cause all the problems you hate so much but are utterly unwilling to blame on government enablement itself.

Ethanol is more energy monster snake-oil-and people who pushed and pushed for it the most energetically, manically, in their ever-emotionally driven insanity???
Environmental lobbyist fucks, flakes, and people who swallow Global Warming disinformation as fervently-there are at least 5 alternatives ready to go, to replace oil. Fuck oil-shut it down, that's the only way to stop the money machine taking the planet down the road of total control-they are afraid- and watch them scramble here t'wards the end of oil as the main fuel source, as prices reach $250-$300 a barrel before 2 more years go by-

5 gallons of waste vegetable oil and a few chemicals make 4 gallons of fuel to run a diesel engine for about 60 cents a gallon.....

and since I mentioned GW and there are some still in the dark???...The planet belches more than we do, get a grip on the reality of the planet you inhabit-Take into account also the sun, and you have your warm globe.....the experts(so-called) are full of horseshit.

Prices are rising because:

- Transportation and production costs of food items are higher.

At the Al-Mara farm in Midland, Va., Jeff and Patty Leonard run a large dairy operation where about 600 cows produce 19,000 pounds of milk each day. They plant about 1,000 acres of corn, so they don't face all of the rising feed costs like some farmers. But they sympathize with consumers because the costs of nitrogen fertilizers and diesel fuel have all gone up sharply, raising production costs by nearly 30 percent.

"It's partly because of corn prices, driven up by congressional mandates for ethanol production, which have reduced the amount of corn available for animal feed. It's also because of tougher immigration enforcement and a late spring freeze, which have made farm laborers scarcer and damaged fruit and vegetable crops, respectively. And it's because of higher diesel fuel costs to run tractors and attractive foreign markets that take U.S. production."

Globalization also explains higher milk prices. Australia, a leading milk exporter, is struggling through a drought, and European governments are pulling back dairy subsidies. So U.S. farmers, aided by a weak dollar, are stepping in to meet growing demand for milk products in China and India. That's pinched supply at home and abroad, driving up prices.

Those "billions in oil profits" B. Hussein Obama and Billswife are slavering over must be reinvested for more oil exploration and technology. The federal mafia takes 20 cents in taxes per gallon of gas sold; they're already getting their share of the action.

It's government regulations that make building new refineries next to impossible, not the free market.

While it's true that reducing demand would reduce gas prices, he's stated at the beginning that won't happen due to China's and India's increased oil demands.

There's another way prices would lower: by increasing the available supply of oil, but the "hippies" in Congress (including McSame) won't let us tap our own supply (ANWR) because it might damage caribou self-esteem.

Alternative fuels? They're going to have to fight it out. Just like BluRay and HD-DVD...let the free market decide which technology wins between hydrogen and electricity and whatever. All government can do is prop up a loser like ethanol to delay whatever was destined to win.

Do you really favor a would-be President who tells you what you're allowed drive, be it scooter or limo? I don't. It's none of his damned business.

Arrogance without substance.

In my opinion, electric is the only viable long term solution. There are several cars in development right now (including the Tesla which is rolling out their first batch) that have good enough range for a day's worth of city driving, and recharge in a few hours. If we get the power from solar, wind, or nuclear power plants, we can cut oil out of the loop. As opposed to ethanol, which is hotly contested in terms of efficiency, electric motors are proven to be very cost effective.

Ah, "pure ethanol", which I associate with "spiritus", the Polish epic pure-booze that absinthe and all the other 'exotic' alcohols have NOTHING on.

Dag, for policy purposes, it should be clear that civil criticism is welcome and part of the site's appeal.

Being a jerk - ad hominem attacks etc., are of course not welcome.

Examples:
+ Saying that you hate someone's opinion and believe it's ill-conceived because it'll bring about the downfall civilization if put into effect because of their support for ethanol will have an adverse impact on the food supply = OK, although you're being heated, you've clearly stated a somewhat intelligent opinion.

- Saying that you hate someone's opinion because they eat babies and are the bane of civilization and they should FOAD and their religion is wrong and their country should be nuked for allowing them to live, they're fat, and they're stinkin' Mac users = Bad, contributes nothing of value and is meant to be harmful (obvious exceptions for SiftRoasts, but if you can't tell the difference between a Roast on SiftTalk and hurtful comments get off the internet, seriously).

That was fun.

The random percentages that he tosses around are laughable. The wildly outrageous numbers on hydrogen, bio fuel, ethanol and wind energy wouldn't even make good sci-fi. Windmills in the Dakotas could today produce all the energy needed for all the cars in the country??? If blacks and whites drove the same kinds of cars employment opportunities and wage discrepency would decrease by about 50%??? $26/barrel oil in 2035???

And yes indeed, let's trust unregulated free market corporate capitalism and the military to save our future. jeezus.

Shame on TED for lending credibility to such a fraud.

Layman's summary and the actual paper, although I'm honestly scared to think about how the media would jump on this. I can just see it now, on Fox News: "ALCOHOL TURNS YOU GAY ITS A CHOICE SCIENCE SAYS SO ALSO YOU RUIN THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE BETWEEN A MAN AND A FLY". Yikes.

The paper itself is damn interesting and amusing, particularly this bit from the discussion:
"Nonetheless, a consistent effect of ethanol on heterosexual behavior observed in our studies of flies and the previous findings in rats [7], [8] and humans [5] is the inhibitory effect on sexual performance. It is tempting to speculate that ethanol may act on similar cellular targets in different species. Comparing the ethanol's effects on heterosexual courtship and copulation, chronic ethanol has opposite effects on sexual arousal and performance of male flies, indicating that their underlying processes may be distinct. It is possible that adaptive changes induced by chronic ethanol exposure are necessary to enhance sexual arousal and may overlap with those underlying behavioral sensitization on disinhibited courtship."

From a sociological perspective, if it could be confirmed that the disinhibitive effect and increase in sexual desire is indeed the same on a cellular level cross-species, this finding would imply that the pressure among humans to continue semi-regular alcohol consumption in adolescence and especially young adulthood could have a physiological basis.

And in addition, to the increase in sexual desire but decrease in performance...therein lies the evil of alcohol. "But I want to! But I can't....but I want to!" Fate worse than death, I'm tellin' ya.

Yes. But not only biofuels like ethanol. How about fast food grease? or hell, I don't know.... hmm electric? You should take a look at "who killed the electric car". It is a GREAT documentary, but so far no luck.
I can't wait for America to wake up on this issue, among others.

First of all, that eye tick is really freakin me out. Mine ticks at times as well and it really bugs the heck out of me. I can't imagine how bad that one must be driving her nuts.

Second, it's really not worth going into all of this guys arguments in a forum like this but I have to pick a few out.

1) "To call it global warming is correct, but almost a misnomer. What we are really doing is adding immense amounts of energy to a system..." Interesting attempt an an explanation here. I think he was attempting to say something along the lines of "... adding CO2 to the atmosphere means that more solar energy is retained by the system." I think it is important not to give approximations or short answers in a discussion like this.

2) 80% reduction in CO2 emissions? Good luck with that. Good of him to start with an easily attainable goal. I don't care that he does mean by 2050. It's not likely to happen without a dramatic new discovery in energy production.

3) I went to the web site he is pimping. Nowhere on it does it explain how we are to achieve these goals in a realistic manner. It has fluff like "More biofeuls, hydropower, solar, and wind" but it also says "eliminate current generation of nuclear plants and do not license new ones." Energy demands in the US and worldwide are steadily increasing. Even with conservation, the rate of increase will only slow not reverse. There isn't enough fresh water on the planet to replace fossil fuels with biofeuls, nor is there enough arable land to grow all these miracle fuels. Hydroelectric power has been under attack for decades because of the damage it does to natural systems and neither solar nor wind are realistically economical or practical to replace a substantial portion of fossil fuels. Demands to "fix the planet now" are all well and good, but you need to provide realistic solutions rather than pie-in-the-sky platitudes.

In my opinion, the best hope for a major shift in the production of energy will be development of a practical cellulosic ethanol production system. Until that happens, we are going to need to invest in energy sources that have at least the potential of meeting our needs.

I believe their current engine uses LOX (liquid oxygen) and 90% ethanol. They have tried multiple different engine configurations and fuels, so after the LLC is won, they may spend more time looking into some other options again. Atm, they want reliability and stability from what they have working. The LOX chamber on the module is the bottom one, the other being fuel. The white coating on that tank is there as insulation as the LOX is obviously very cold, and the engine is not... Being so cold, LOX can be used in a regeneratively cooled engine design, where the LOX acts as a coolant for the engines throat before entering the engine itself.