Houston Chronicle Shannon Tompkins Column: Ethanol Imperils Texas Grasslands
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By Shannon Tompkins, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 22--The price paid to farmers for a bushel of corn jumped more than a third over the past year, with bushel prices on commodity markets going from a little over $2 to more than $4.
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HELOTES, Tex. -- The smoke comes and goes with the breeze, but some days it blankets Deanna Rodriguez's neighborhood, covering cars in grimy ash and seeping inside homes. Some days, when the wind blows from the south, her house becomes almost uninhabitable.
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WALL, S.D. -- Here on the sun-parched prairie, where rain seems as rare as gold dust, the fight over federal grassland is unending, pitting the backers of the crowd-pleasing prairie dog against the supporters of the humble cow. This week, the Bush administration could open the door to poisoning m...
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The government says we must use 9 billion gallons of ethanol this year. Some lawmakers worry federal ethanol mandates are "taking the biofuels industry backward rather than pushing it ahead."
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Brazil's sugar cane provides the ethanol that fuels eight out of every 10 new Brazilian cars. Bush wants an alliance with the planet's undisputed renewable energy leader. By the Associated Press.
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Cuba has the potential to make 3.2 billion gallons of ethanol a year, a figure that would make it the world's third-biggest producer. Reaching that target would require a massive infusion of foreign capital, but with Cuba quietly modernizing its ethanol infrastructure, is the country preparing to jump into the ethanol game?
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Willie Nelson's new Mercedes has never had a drop of gas in it, but it drives as well as any car he's ever had. So, he wonders, why aren't foreclosed family farms in the United States being used to grow soy, corn and other vegetables for environmentally friendly fuels?
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By Max B. Baker, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Jun.
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By WALTER C. JONES  ATLANTA - An innovative company from the West has chosen the pine forests of Southeast Georgia as the location for the country's first plant to process pine scraps into ethanol, the alternative fuel mostly distilled from Midwestern corn.
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Fears of world food shortages caused by booming use of sugar cane and corn to produce ethanol fuel for motor vehicles are overblown and politically motivated, analysts and politicians said on Monday.
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The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming.
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Crop switch likely to increase emissions Good science news (or bad, depending on your point of view) has arrived with two reports on the carbon footprint of biofuels, in the paper edition of Science magazine. They deal serious damage to the belief - which up to now has been driving the biofuel bubble - that stepped-up ethanol production in the US is an answer to global warming.â¦
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Clearing land to produce biofuels such as ethanol will do more to exacerbate global warming than using gasoline or other fossil fuels, two scientific studies show.
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Rather than a help toward energy independence, Big Oil and ethanol could be roadblocks.
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Even as some states are mandating ethanol as part of the fuel mix, new research suggests that some biofuels are less ecofriendly than they seem.
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You may have read that President Bush wants to see the 35 million acres of land set aside for conservation and wildlife instead planted in corn to feed vastly expanded ethanol production.
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Producing biofuels from a fast-growing grass emit up to 94% less carbon dioxide than petrol, a large-scale study finds.