Web sites offer data on ethanol

To the editor:

It is difficult to respond in a meaningful way to "Ethanol is beneficial in so many ways," an outright propaganda piece that appeals to raw emotions, not to the intellect of the reader.

First, some factual corrections: I have been a professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last 15 years. My background is in chemical engineering and physics. Before, I spent seven years at Shell Development, the best oil-industry research organization ever, created by none other than Dr. M. King Hubbert. Readers may recall that Hubbert was the first U.S. geophysicist to state clearly in 1956 that all fossil fuels were limited in quantity and that the U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. Hubbert was ridiculed and ignored for 20 years, until in 1976 the National Academy of Sciences certified that he was right and most everyone else was wrong.

Because Southeast Missourian readers can think independently, I would like to ask them to compare the calculations by the various authors at this Web site:

http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/ CRPS416-Patzek-Web.pdf

Background information about energy use in agriculture and society can be found at this Web site:

http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/patzek/BiofuelQA/ Materials/QAarchive2005.htm

I do hope that ultimately common sense and science will prevail, and name-calling and shouting will stop.

TED W. PATZEK, Oakland, Calif.