Bloomington, Minnesota Schools Close as Buses Choke on Biodiesel in the Cold
The Star Tribune (Minneapolis): Jan. 16 — All schools in the Bloomington School District will be closed today after state-required biodiesel fuel clogged in school buses Thursday morning and left dozens of students stranded in frigid weather, the district said late Thursday.

Rick Kaufman, the district’s spokesman, said elements in the biodiesel fuel that turn into a gel-like substance at temperatures below 10 degrees clogged about a dozen district buses…

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I proudly feature this World Climate Report blog by my friends, climate scientists Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger. — Marlo

March 5, 2008
Want to Increase Your Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Use Biofuels!

In almost every essay we feature at World Climate Report, our focus is on climatic phenomena and the general disagreement between observations and what numerical models of climate tell us should be happening given the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. We draw heavily from the professional scientific peer-reviewed literature, and our…

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Feeding Ethanol Byproducts to Cattle Increases Risk of E. Coli Being Passed on to Humans, Says Kansas State Study

UPI Science News

– December 4, 2007 — A U.S. study has found feeding distiller’s grains to cattle results in the increased prevalence of E. coli 0157 in their bodies, posing a risk to humans.

Kansas State University Professor T.G. Nagaraja notes ethanol plants and livestock producers have created a symbiotic relationship. Cattle producers feed their livestock distiller’s grains, a byproduct of the ethanol distilling…

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Venerable Washington Post outdoors writer Angus Phillips had a few words to say about ethanol and boat motors in his 18 Nov column, … mostly words born of frustration.

Here’s a few of the lead in’s to his advice column about how to keep your boat motor from being a victim of ethanol

The villian is e-10, the ethanol gasoline mix that is now standard issue at most fuel pumps …

E-10 means 10 percent ethanol, which is basically corn alcohol … it poses…

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As climate protection policy, bio-fuel mandates are worse than useless. Three recent studies show that current bio-fuel initiatives actually contribute to global warming.

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The October 15 issue of Wired magazine contains an informative article about cellulosic ethanol. Titled “One molecule could cure our addiction to oil,” the article, by Evan Ratlif, is cautiously bullish on cellulose, concluding that the proliferation of well-funded research efforts “stacks the deck in favor” of cellulosic ethanol becoming cost-competitive in five to seven years.

Well, only time will tell. As Ratlif notes, the federal government first funded research on cellulosic ethanol in the ’70s. And although, “We can run our cars…

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On March 16th, more than a dozen U.S. Senators wrote to Unerwriters’ Labortay urging them to speed along the process of UL certifying E-85 pumps. 

Remember, UL said some months ago E-85 was so corrosive that it could not certify pumps. 

It is politics versus science:

POLITICS: According to Sen John Thune, South Dakota’s Republican: “I think what we need more than anything else is we need some quick action on this. This is a real problem for ethanol infrastructure in this country.”

As…

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The Associated Press is reporting that the boom in ethanol is creating such an unprecedented demand for seeds, that corn growers are now essentially forced to use the wrong varieties of seeds for their areas.  What does that mean?  Corn seed more susceptible to pests, less drought tolerant, less cold tolerant, etc etc etc are being planted in the wrong areas, … meaning that yields from the marginal areas newly planted to corn will be lower than normally could be expected, and…

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“Be like Brazil” have never beeen words to live by except perhaps in soccer or samba. But suddenly Americans are being told we should imitate Brazil in its expensive devotion to driving cars that run on ethanol. VeraSun Energy, the second-lartgest U.S. ethanol producer, was the talk of Wall Street this week with its IPO. Wal-Mart wants to install pumps to cater to cars that run on a largely ethanol blend. Even Rudy Giuliani was plumping for the stuff this…

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Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute with a wake up call on ethanol and the environment:

I cringe when the urban newspapers casually say we can make “lots of auto fuel” as ethanol from cornstalks and whear straw.

It ain’t so.

If we turn the crop stalks into ethanol, we’ll have the only problem that could be bigger than an energy shortage-a topsoil shortage.

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