super-structure

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Angela forwarded me a similar article on some resent research which states that ethanol may have greater health risks than gasoline as a auto fuel. From the article I tagged in del.icio.us from New Scientist (see lower right, titled "Warning: Biofuel may harm your health"), it appears that the number of deaths increases by 185 going to an ethanol fleet from a gasoline fleet in the Stanford researchers model. That’s out of about 10,000 deaths annually, or less than 2%. Frankly, I have reservations against believing that one model can really predict within 2% (maybe if this was a summary of several studies). But assuming it is accurate, there’s always the question about what carbon emissions will do as well. Will more than 185 people die as a result of not switching to biofuels. Frankly, I think that a switch to non-carbon based fuel sources or generation of energy (e.g. – wind, solar, hydro, geo, etc.) is the only long-term, sustainable answer in any case. [1 # ]