ethanol - worse than gas?
[via Sam Smith’s Progressive Review]
STUDY: HEALTH RISK FROM ETHANOL
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - A new study out of Stanford says pollution
from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than
gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory
diseases. “Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel
that will reduce global warming and air pollution,” Mark Z. Jacobson,
the study’s author and an atmospheric scientist at Stanford, said in
a statement. “But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses
an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which
already causes significant health damage.”
The study appears in today’s online edition of Environmental Science
& Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. It
comes at a time when the Bush administration is pushing plans to
boost ethanol production and the nation’s automakers are required by
2012 to have half their vehicles run on flex fuel, allowing the use
of either gasoline or ethanol.
He found that ethanol-burning cars could boost levels of toxic ozone
gas in urban areas, but that Los Angeles residents would be by far
the hardest hit because of the city’s reliance on the automobile and
environmental factors that tend to concentrate smog there. His study
showed that the city would experience a 9 percent increase in the
rate of ozone-related respiratory deaths — 120 more deaths per year
– compared with what would have been projected in 2020 assuming
continued gasoline use.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/ETHANOL.TMP