Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Obama's cabinet drunk on ethanol?

Obama's cabinet is looking very friendly toward ethanol, The Hill reports. Vilsack from Iowa at Agriculture, Salazar from Colorado at Interior, Daschle from South Dakota at HHS and likely Transportation nominee Ray LaHood are all big ethanol boosters. Chu at Energy, while critical of corn ethanol, has been an advocate for cellulosic.

I can't help but wonder who will be sitting at the table who understands and believes in transportation electrification. Will "flex-fuel" once again subvert the necessary transformation of the American auto industry?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Anything that cuts into big business' revenue flow will be fought tooth and nail to the end. It will be quite some time before we are allowed transportation fueled independent of our keepers aim. By the time EVs are mainstream, the "energy" companies will control PV production, as they almost do now, and it will cost us the same as we spend on liquid fuel now. We are only here to serve our masters.
"It's why they call it the American dream- you have to be asleep to believe it".
-George Carlin

BobZybach said...

Thanks to wildfire, we now have abundant dead trees in the Pacific Northwest and California.

We had had the capability of transforming dead trees to electricity for more than 100 years, yet choose to let them rot in ugly, dangerous stands that continue to spew massive amounts of CO2 into the air, long after the smoke has cleared.

There is much discussion about creating rural jobs and restoring forest health by creating methanol or ethanol from dead trees and shrubs remaining from wildfire. A better choice might be electricity.