Physicist to head Energy Department

Fancy that, a physicist in charge of the Department of Energy.  Nobel prize winning physicist, Stephen Chu, is nominated as incoming Secretary of said department.  PBS re-airs its piece: Physicist Searches for Alternative Fuel Technologies.  Tad Patzek, also a professor at Berkeley, questions Mr. Chu's position.

teachin

featuring Ted Patzek and David Pimentel
teach-in

local considerations

in the California desert. Per the Riverside County Press Enterprise, green efforts. See also the work of Berkeley professor Tad Patzek on ethanol and energy.

grasping at straws

Over $100 million has been spent on Proposition 87 on California's ballot, a large sum. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been featured in ads favoring the cause. One such ad states:

Imagine if we can stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it.
They made a simple change to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops.
If Brazil could do it, so could California.

Mr. Clinton promulgates similar themes with his Global Initiative, a recent meeting of which was critiqued thusly in TNR.

How true are the above claims? I've looked at them before, in Brazil and ethanol and ethanol, the panacea. Recently, Robert Rapier, at The Oil Drum, points out:

Brazil’s energy independence miracle was 10% ethanol and 90% domestic crude oil production.

This is astonishing and at such great odds with the basic pro-87 premise, especially when one considers that:

• Brazilian ethanol is also subsidized by government
• Enriching the well-connected
  
• Sugar cane grown in a tropical clime captures much more solar energy than anything in California and
  
• The environmental destruction is great
  

Tad Patzek of U.C. Berkeley also seriously doubts the pro-87 hype. Mr. Patzek took part in an ezine discussion about ethanol about which he comments:

My 1-hour working meeting with Mr. Khosla was *not* a debate. We both tried to establish points of mutual agreement and disagreement. While certainly there was agreement on several key issues, there was also significant, one might say fundamental, disagreement on biofuels. I find the biofuel focus of Proposition 87 to be inconsistent with the very survival of life diversity and key ecosystems on the Earth and, consequently, I do not favor Proposition 87.

Scientific American this year devotes its September special focus issue, as with part of last, to Energy's Future - Beyond Carbon. Again the emphasis is on global warming rather than fossil fuel depletion. Daniel M. Kammen (a Berkeley professor like Mr. Patzek) is author of the article, The Rise of Renewable Energy, in which he writes:

When all the inputs and outputs were correctly factored in, we found that ethanol has a positive net energy...

Mr. Patzek would strongly dispute that contention and others by Mr. Kammen.

Update (06-11-09): California Proposition 87 was defeated 55% to 45%. Also, from an analyst local to my area, Ethanol experiment goes off track.

Update (07-1-2): Scientific American publishes article Is Ethanol for the Long Haul?
summarized thus. The author, Matthew L. Wald, is a reporter for the N.Y. Times; puzzlingly, his scientific credentials are not listed in Sciam. Here's another article of his on the subject.

ethanol, the panacea?

on a TV near you
NBC: Dateline NBC but see this MSNBC piece .
CBS 60 minutes but see other CBS piece
ABC: World News Tonight and this
CNN: Presents segment on ethanol in We Were Warned (for more info)

But see the Wikipedia piece on fuel ethanol, and its external links, such as the 2004 scholarly article by Tad Patzek and Pimentel's research. Patzek writes:

In this paper, I will describe in some detail the unfavorable thermodynamics of the industrial production of ethanol from one particular food crop, corn. I will use the Second Law of thermodynamics to track what is happening to us as mere years pass, and the precious resources the sun and the earth have been making and storing for millions of years are being squandered in front of our eyes.

The focus of Patzek's article is corn, but he does briefly compare the net energy of corn to switchgrasses and sugarcane. For more on sugarcane, see this other Wikipedia article.