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Ethanol causes more smog?
Study says fuel touted by Bush could be worse for environment

While ethanol is widely touted as a solution to air pollution, when Brazil promoted the alternative fuel in the 1970s the skies above the South American nation's cities actually became smoggier.

Mark Jacobson, an atmospheric chemist at Stanford University, says in a newly published research paper ethanol isn't the clean-burning, healthy alternative to gasoline it's made out to be, reports Environmental Science and Technology Online.

A move to E85 blends of auto fuel, as espoused by President Bush – 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline – actually could result in more ozone and about 185 more deaths per year across the U.S., Jacobson said in his paper, published by ES&T's Research ASAP.

In his State of the Union address this year, Bush argued for increased use of ethanol to decrease dependence on foreign oil sources, provide a new market for farmers and conserve the environment.

The president is making ethanol the keystone of a plan to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years.

"Ethanol is good for the environment because it burns cleaner than gasoline and produces less air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions," says a fact sheet issued by the White House.

But Jacobson's study shows switching to E85 blends could result in slightly higher ozone-related mortality, hospitalization and asthma. Cancer rates would be similar for gasoline and E85, he contends.

"It's true that ethanol does decrease some pollutants, but it also increases some others," Jacobson says, according to Environmental Science and Technology Online.

Ethanol tends to produce less benzene and butadiene than gasoline but more acetaldehyde and formaldehyde.

Jacobson argues previous studies estimating pollution and health effects simply scaled up tailpipe emissions and plugged those numbers into outdated formulas, the science publication reports.

Unlike the other studies, Jacobson's atmospheric model accounts for the transport of tailpipe emissions across the U.S. along with chemical transformations in the atmosphere.

Mark Delucchi, a transportation analyst at the University of California, Davis, told Environmental Science and Technology Online biofuels such as ethanol "simply have not been well studied yet."

"We really don't know even the sign of the impacts, positive or negative" on climate, he says.

Nevertheless, corn planting has jumped 15 percent this year in the wake of Bush's January speech.

Ethanol is being studied by California as part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's executive order calling for 10 percent less carbon in fuels by 2020. But the state is not moving ahead just yet as it takes time to examine ethanol's effect on air quality.

This is another one of those "let's blame Bush, it's all his fault". The Renewable Action Project, more commonly called REAP, is a national coalition of approximately forty different major environmental groups, agricultural interests, local governments and ethanol producers. The environmentalists of REAP are the ones that promoted and still promotes the use of ethanol production. It is this group that Bush relied on for the information he received that has caused him to support the use of ethanol. If he is guilty of anything it is in listening to wrong people, the "green earth" groups (does this sound familiar? war on Iraq).

This is the same situation as the use of fluorescent lighting that the environmentalists are pushing on us, which creates a bigger environmental disaster than we currently experience with incandescent lighting because of their mercury content.

isn't that the oil they throw out after frying tons of french fries at fast foods?

No. Ethanol is produced from corn and is directly used just for the purpose indicated, as a fuel or fuel additive to increase the octane of gas. There are several processing plants nearby me as this is corn country. These plants were at one time producing drinking alcohol only and got closed down. With the advent of ethanol production they were modernized and re-opened. The pollution from these plants is horrendous especially in the summer heat. It is thought by some to cause defects in fetus'. I am sure that it causes many here to have problems with their lungs.