DENNIS BUECKERT
OTTAWA (CP) - Canada is losing out on ethanol production and will have to import enough to meet Kyoto targets if the federal government doesn't come up with more incentives, the industry says.
Other countries, notably the United States, offer higher subsidies for new ethanol plants, a report released by the industry Wednesday says. And if Ottawa doesn't come up with better incentives for the Canadian industry, supplies to meet an ever-increasing demand will have to be imported, a report released Wednesday says.
Stumble It!
Kevin
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"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
--Bertrand Russell
Ethanol is expensive because it requires a lot of energy and capital investments to produce. This waste of resources is hard on the environment and contributes to pollution much more than if it were never produced at all. It takes more energy to convert one acre of corn into ethanol than the amount of energy you could ever get out of that ethanol, it's ridiculously un-sustainable.
Ethanol producers only point to the tailpipe of the car when they say it's so much better for the environment, but what they don't want you to know is the amount of diesel fuel the harvester and other trucks had to use, the electricity used in production, the natural gas used in production, the millions of tax dollars in subsidies that could have been better spent, the alternate uses that all that productive capacity could have been used for... etc. etc. It would be better for the environment if we paid farmers to just sit on their butts and do nothing at all
Kevin
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"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
--Bertrand Russell
If consumer demand for ethanol is real, consumers will frequent the gas bars that have it in their gas, but so far there doesn't seem to be any real demand, just promotion from ethanol producers.
The producers want money from gov't because they know that the demand isn't there and therefore no one else is about to invest their own savings account into ethanol production.