E Magazine
To The Last Drop
by Jim Motavalli
Robert Bryce’s Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (PublicAffairs, $26.95) is a timely book. If you’ve ever wondered why we haven’t abandoned our addiction to oil and simply started running our cars on ethanol from corn or biodiesel from soybeans (or even used fast-food fryer oil), you need this sobering account.
With a relatively ruthless pen, Bryce cuts through the notion that we can grow our way to oil freedom. As he points out, the 36 billion gallons of biofuels the U.S. is committed to producing by 2022 is only about a tenth of our annual fossil fuel usage. If we used every last corn stalk to produce ethanol, we’d offset less than 15 percent of our vast consumption. One estimate Bryce quotes says that it would take 546 million farmed acres to replace all of our gasoline with corn ethanol, but we have only 440 million acres of U.S. farmland. The outlook for biodiesel and nuclear power isn’t a whole lot better, says Bryce. When it comes to energy independence, he adds, “There’s far too much religion and far too little science.”
Original text available here: http://www.emagazine.com/view/?4196
