Link to NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02energy.html?hp&ex=1138942800&en=884f904a8b1146b8&ei=5094&partner=homepageAbstract from Daily Kos:
**** You Can\'t Make Up: Bush to Lay Off Renewable Energy Researchers
by essexblue
Thu Feb 02, 2006 at 03:19:30 AM PDT
We are asked to suffer the Secretary of Energy telling us within 24 hours that Bush lied in his speech about reducing Middle Eastern oil imports. We are asked to suffer oil-state Republicans who once gave away the oil under federal land but who are now tightwads when it comes to subsidizing other fuels.
And, now, we are asked to suffer this:
From today\'s NYT:
The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.
A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation\'s oil imports........
Normally this would be a big *BUSTED* but people are so used to hearing lies from Bush I doubt it will raise many eyebrows.
By the way, Ethanol is definitely not many years away in terms of research and development to use in automobile and other engines.
Ethanol was actually used
before gasoline in the United States. It is a natural anti-knock fuel and the only reason the switch to gasoline was made was because of corporate greed and fudged reseach showing that gasoline + tetraethyl lead (for antiknock) was safe and more profitable.
The result of that was 70 or so years of lead being spewed into our atmosphere, soil, and water supplies. When leaded gasoline was done away with in the USA (I believe some other nations are still using the stuff), we were stuck with gasoline until present day.
There\'s no doubt in my mind that Ford / GM / etc all have working and viable ethanol engine prototypes ready to go, and have all along.
...
Oh yeah, ethanol has problems as well. Especially if blended with gasoline, it actually produces more evaporative greenhouse gasses. 100% Ethanol blends would be a much cleaner burning fuel, but it would probably be more expensive than gasoline unless the government were to subsidize it heavily. Also, it could be very difficult to supply enough corn to replace all the gasoline we use, and doing so could easily turn into an ecological disaster of its own.
Time to stop fuckin around and develop some serious fuel cells. Japanese auto makers are already doing so and have a serious edge over us in this area (what else is new).