Talk:Energy Victory

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Food Sourced Ethanol?

I thought Dr. Robert Zubrin's book, Energy Victory, advocated against using food stuffs for the production of ethanol? That's not to say that he would advocate some ban on such before a transition to non-food sourced ethanol and/or methanol can be established. However, this is one of the reasons for the emphasis on having the FFVs be able to handle methanol in addition to ethanol and gasoline. -- DWHalliday (talk) 22:30, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe he did argue for food-sourced ethanol, but noted that with such an increased demand, supply would also rise as farmers in the third world switched from cash crops (like poppies) to food crops for food and biofuel. He also noted that methanol can be made from non-food cellulose, and it is also possible to create ethanol from this as well. The way I read it, having FFVs run on methanol AND ethanol was to further erode gasoline's monopoly power (by increasing the substitutability of gas), and therefore cripple OPEC.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 11:51, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

On topic??

This is an article about of the contents of Dr Zubrin's book, not a general discussion on various types of non-fossil-fuel power sources (eg, the current addition of Methanol Fuel Cell powered cars). Certainly this page should link to these or other related discussions (perhaps through a "see also" section), but unless Zubrin directly discusses an option in his book, or a critic of his book has offered this or that up as an alternative solution to the Energy Victory argument, I think it should be left out. --Yeti Hunter (talk) 01:35, 26 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A "see also" section sounds appropriate to me. Unfortunately, I haven't read the book itself so I'm not sure what he did or did not talk about concerning such matters. I arrived here based upon his writing in New Atlantis. -- DWHalliday (talk) 01:48, 27 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You may be interested in Zubrin's Authors@Google lecture:

Authors@Google: Dr. Robert Zubrin on YouTube

I have not yet read Energy Victory either, but in his talk he shows a lot of PowerPoint-type slides which presumably give his book's basic outline. I found it somewhat odd that Zubrin seems to dismiss Peak oil concerns, in the sense that he blames OPEC collusion for the Oil price increases since 2003 rather than the geological supply difficulties which increase with time according to Hubbert peak theory. (People who believe in a near-term peaking of world oil production would say petroleum consumers would be in much the same predicament with or without OPEC.) Rather, his concern is Energy security for the United States. However, strategies for Mitigation of peak oil are basically the same as for increasing energy security, so it probably doesn't matter what Zubrin thinks about peak oil - his proposed solutions will look about the same. See also Pickens Plan. --Teratornis (talk) 23:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]