Alternative Energies

Alternative Energies

In the book Greasy Rider by Greg Melville, he talks about many different kinds of alternative/renewable energy sources that he thinks are the most important and are the most beneficial to our everyday lives. The three that I think are the most important that he discusses in his book are biofuel, solar panels, and wind power.
Biofuel is basically the main alternative energy source that he talks about in his book because the car which he and Iggy drive across the country ran on biofuel which is what the whole book is really about. Towards the beginning of the book Melville says that it took him and his wife about the same amount of money they paid for the car to fix it. They figured that once the car was running on vegetable oil that they would get all their money back from gas savings. He also talks about that if he wanted to become a carbon neutral like Al Gore that he would have to go out and plant trees, build solar panels, wind turbines and help clean up methane landfills to prevent greenhouse gases from affecting the atmosphere. About twenty tons of carbon dioxide is released every year into the atmosphere by Americans. Another word that is used for biofuel is ethanol. Ethanol today is being used around the world as an alternative to regular gasoline. In the U.S. we are beginning to use corn based ethanol and biodiesel from oil seeds, but some say it’s a poor use of land. To till the corn fields, fertilize them and harvest the corn means that farmers have to use huge machines that burn a lot of fossil fuels that is released into the air. Using corn based ethanol can also be bad for the animals that we eat, like cows, pigs, chickens. Since all these animals eat corn what will they eat when most of it is being used to fuel our cars. Farmers are paying more these days just to be able to feed their animals and with that the cost of having their meat sent out to the stores that we shop at will go up to, so almost everything we eat will go up in prices. It’s...