America's new energy plan backs ethanol and high-efficiency carsUS president Barack Obama's energy plan calls for higher efficiency standards for cars as well as greater use of ethanol. It aims to cut US oil demand by about four million barrels a day. That's equal to the combined oil consumption of France and Canada, and would knock the bottom off the world oil market. That has to be a good thing in a world of energy shortages, even though a study conducted at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment claims that reliance on biofuels is not a good strategy. If Obama's new energy plan take off, it would promote interest in research and development of clean, alternative energy options like those of wind, water, solar and hydrogen resources as well as develop hybrid vehicles. It could find ways of making crop-based biofuels viable. Oil's long term costs, which include reliance on oilfields in geopolitically unstable parts of the world, would make it a far more expensive choice, besides its negative impacts on environment and health.
It might be that presently America's ethanol-from-corn projects consume a great deal of energy and have driven upward the price of food crops on account of farmland diversion. But there are success stories in other places. In Brazil, sugarcane ethanol has reduced the country's dependence on fossil fuels and cleaned up transport industry. Moreover, sugarcane cultivated for ethanol here is grown in the south, far away from the Amazonian rainforests. Therefore, a region-specific cost-benefit analysis of crop-based fuels would reveal what kind of crops are most suitable for use as fuel to supplement the world's energy requirements in a manner that is beneficial to all.
A fall in US petrol demand will have a positive global impact since it is the world's largest importer of petrol. The new administration's thrust on clean energy and scaling down of petrol consumption could well set the pace for a future where oil would no longer dominate geopolitics.
(The Times of India: 17.2.2009)
