Tuesday, June 03, 2003

The battle over ethanol's impact on the environment when blended with gasoline continues. Read all about at: Senate begins debate on increasing amount of ethanol in gasoline, ENN's latest article on the subject. This is important because it impacts farmers in Great Lakes states directly. The sad part is that at the end, they haven't realized they could eliminate half the criticisms by using wind energy and solar power to implement ethanol's production at several stages of the cycle - a move that would give an advantage to Great Lakes region farmers in ethanol crop production - and encourage ethanol producers to locate in the Great Lakes region where such clean power sources are available abundantly, and so are people all over the area that have seen other manufacturing jobs go to Mexico, South America, and China. But of course, that's my opinion on another drop in the regional economic impact bucket that still hasn't fallen from the tap yet...yet...come on, girls and boys, let's all make some noise - to bring those jobs home. Oh, and farmers - increase demand for local energy after they move here by migrating your farm equipment to ethanol and biodiesel fuels rather than oil...every such move pulls the economic activity closer to home...

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