Renewable energy. That’s what bio-fuels like ethanol promise. Unlike petroleum, which is rather finite, sits in the ground until pumped, then disappears into pollution and landfills, bio-fuels can be grown again and again. Right?
Right. Mostly.
Somewhere there’s a spreadsheet that started it all, and convinced the powers that be that growing fuel was less expensive than pumping it from the ground. So, let’s blame the spreadsheet for what has happened to the price of oil and the price of corn. Both are at record levels. Farmers, corn growers in the midwest, are profiting as never before in a rapidly growing bio-fuel economy that has just begun to take root and grow, so to speak.
I had the pleasure of using one of the first spreadsheets on a personal computer well over 25 years ago. A spreadsheet is a wonderful tool to track information, sort information, display information. Modern spreadsheets are so go that numbers can be manipulated to show anything is possible, and people will believe it because that’s what the numbers say. Uh huh. See the problem?
If anyone comes across the spreadsheet that started it all, that moved the country down the bio-fuel path, please send me a copy. I simply want to know how it is that a gallon of something that costs money to grow is less expensive than a gallon of something that costs nothing to grow.
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