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Green technology isn't always very green If I see one more article about how wonderful alternative energy is compared to oil, I'm gonna flip. Alternative energy sources can be good — very good in fact. And it's pretty obvious that we're going to need them, and that our dependence on oil (foreign or otherwise) is a Bad Thing. But accepting that does not mean accepting that any kind of alternative energy is by default a good thing. To be a good thing, it has to have three properties: 1) It has to help reduce our dependence on oil, 2) It has to be no worse for the environment, and 3) It has to be economically practical. Many of the things touted meet one or even two of those criteria. Solar panels, for example. They can reduce our need for oil, at least in certain regions, and they're certainly not bad for the environment. But they're prohibitively expensive. If you spend the money to make your home solar-powered, you probably won't recoup your costs for at least 15 years, which approaches the lifespan of the panels. I realize that these days, taking a moderate position on anything makes you the enemy of everyone who has an extreme view. But green isn't always good, and oil isn't always bad. Certainly we need to clean up our act big time and find viable sources of alternative energy. Depending on the Saudis — and oil — for our energy needs is stupid. But we also have to keep in mind that every one of these alternative-energy sources comes at a cost, which is something people seem to forget. They hear the phrase "alternative energy" and automatically assume it's got to be good. And this makes them no better than the people who hear it and think it's a waste of time. It's not easy being green Two seemingly "green" technologies that pop up again and again are ethanol and electric cars. Both are touted by well-meaning people as good for the environment and a way to reduce our oil dependence, especially as oil prices continue to rise. I've written in detail about ethanol before, but it deserves a rehash. The Senate, you see, is considering a bill that would require a doubling of the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline at the pump. They say it's about oil dependence and the environment, but it's not. It's about buying votes from farmers by artificially creating demand for crops — ethanol coming, in large part, from corn. But there are a bunch of problems with ethanol. First, it doesn't have as much energy as gasoline, which means it takes about 1.5 gallons of ethanol to get you as far as one gallon of gas. Ethanol also requires a lot to produce it — 26 pounds of corn to get a gallon, in fact. And growing corn requires lots of water and fertilizer and pesticide, not to mention the energy required to distill it into ethanol. And by-products of that distillation include (according to the EPA) acetic acid, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and methanol, all of which are pumped into the air. Yum. It boils down to this: Ethanol sounds good, but the energy required to produce it, and the pollutants it generates, mean it's arguably worse for the environment than gasoline, especially considering the cleanliness of today's engines. On the other hand, even with the acreage, water, fertilizer, and pesticide, ethanol has one big thing going for it: It's not produced by the Saudis. It's electric Hearing the un-researched praises heaped on ethanol sets my teeth on edge, but hearing the supposed ecological wonders of electric cars makes me want to bang my head against the desk. (I'm talking about true electric vehicles, not hybrids.) Electric cars are dirty. In fact, not only are they dirty, they might even be more dirty than their gasoline-powered cousins. People in California love to talk about "zero-emissions vehicles," but people in California seem to be clueless about where electricity comes from. How else can you explain a state that uses more and more of it while not allowing new power plants to be built? Quoth Schoolhouse Rock: "Power plants most all use fire to make it: electricity, electricity/Burnin' fuel and usin' steam, they generate electricity — electricity." Aside from the few folks who have their roofs covered with solar cells, we get our electricity from generators. Generators are fueled by something — usually a hydrocarbon (coal, oil, diesel) but also by heat generated in nuclear power plants. (There are a few wind farms and geothermal plants as well, but by far we get electricity by burning something.) In other words, those "zero-emissions" cars are likely coal-burning cars. It's just the coal is burned somewhere else so it looks clean. It isn't. It's as if the California Greens are covering their eyes — "If I can't see it, it's not happening." But it's worse than that. Gasoline is an incredibly efficient way to power a vehicle; a gallon of gas has a lot of energy in it. But when you take that gas (or another fuel) and first use it to make electricity, you waste a nice chunk of that energy, mostly in the form of wasted heat — at the generator, through the transmission lines, etc. In other words, a gallon of gas may propel your car 25 miles. But the electricity you get from that gallon of gas won't get you nearly as far — so electric cars burn more fuel than gas-powered ones. If our electricity came mostly from nukes, or geothermal, or hydro, or solar, or wind, then an electric car truly would be clean. But for political, technical, and economic reasons, we don't use much of those energy sources. We should, but we don't — that means those electric cars have a dirty past. Furthermore, today's cars are very, very clean. I'd be willing to bet they're a lot cleaner than coal-burning power plants. And that's not even getting into whatever toxic niceties are in those electric cars' batteries — stuff that will eventually end up in a landfill. And finally, when cars are the polluters, the pollution is spread across all the roads. When it's a power plant, though, all the junk is in one place. Nature is very good at cleaning up when things are not too concentrated, but it takes a lot longer when all the garbage is in one spot. Being green is good. We've squandered our space program on things like the International Space Money Pit, so we won't be leaving the planet very soon. It's what we've got and we should do better at taking care of it. But that doesn't mean we should jump on any technology labeled "green" anymore than investors should have jumped on any stock labeled "tech" in the 1990s. We know what happened there.