The Green Conundrum

Green is not always Good!

We recently learned that the carbon footprint of electric cars is about the same as internal combustion engines because of the energy required to make, and then dispose of, the batteries in the electric car. And lets face it, the electricity used to charge the things is coming from a power station somewhere that's probably burning hydrocarbon fuel. Energy must be conserved - that's the Law. All you have done is move the emission site from multple sources to a single source.
And as I posted earlier, the project I am working on is going to be cancelled. There are several reasons, but one of the main ones is that it requires three times more energy than it produces. The plan was to turn agricultural waste into bio diesel. The short description is that you use heat to break down the waste into a CO and Hydrogen syngas. These are then are reacted in a catalyst bed to produce hydrocarbon molecules. But you have to compress the syngas in order to get it from the gasifier to the catalyst bed and that takes horsepower. A lot of horsepower. We discovered that the amount of diesel burned to generate electricity for the plant was going to be three times what the plant produced. Clearly an economic death spiral.
Don't forget that ethanol reduces gas mileage and increases ozone production. It also drives up the cost of staple foods as the land previously used for feeding humans is used instead to produce corn for ethanol.
And when you are forced to use CFL light bulbs, remember that they contain mercury. Breaking one in your home is not a good thing. And workers in the Chinese factory that make them are coming down with mercury poisoning.

So there's the Green Conundrum - Green does not always mean it's Good.