About two or three years ago on freewebs.com/thenearbyfuture I wrote a particular article about the dangers of using corn as fuel. It was moved to this site earlier in January (view it here) and I thought that it contained some good points. If people had taken the article seriously, then corn and our economy would be in much better shape.

But no. People couldn’t continue research on air powered cars, algae power, solar power, or so many other renewable energy sources that wouldn’t have hurt the economy; any other plant used to replace corn as the ingredient in ethanol would help us out a lot.Why didn’t the world listen?

Some facts about the fight over corn fuel:

• So politicians nod and approve it, automakers throw in their lot and make trucks and cars that run on corn fuel, farmers send tons of corn to refineries- so what could be wrong? More than people are giving a thought.
• The refineries that make corn powered fuel actually use more energy than the corn actually gives cars. So the benefits energy-wise are limited. Also think about the pesticides used to grow all this needed corn; it isn’t good (we’re spraying CHEMICALS on the land for heavens sake of course it isn’t good!) because is causes water pollution.
• Corn powered cars run out of energy quicker and the vehicle needs to fill up more often. Not good news for environmentalists who like car trips.
• Like Social Security, we’re stretching corn’s abilities over too many fronts! It can’t be sweetener, cooking supplies, food, ingredients in cleaners AND fuel! That’s just asking too much.

So with that said, we need an alternative. Maybe another plant to produce ethanol to power cars? That would work! We could use algae which doesn’t take up space where crops should be and grows pretty fast.

The moral of this article is that The Nearby Future has some good points, whether people acknowledge them or not! And sometimes acknowledging our ideas earlier next time might actually help our world….

-Frustrated Rika

“Eat the corn, screw the cars.”