Environmentally Safe Ethanol :: Environment, natural resources, fossil fuels

Environmentally Safe Ethanol In order to fund conservation of the natural environment, the federal government should increase gasoline tax by one dollar per gallon. How does this statement make you feel? Does it make you want to argue about how unfair this is, especially when gas prices are climbing to higher and higher rates? Would you say that this is an unfair claim because it is unclear where your tax money would go? I agree. This plan seems to have a good general idea, but there are details left out. I think the first priority should be to sort out where these extra resources would be used. It seems too vague to fund conservation of the natural environment. There are so many ways that this tax could benefit natural resources. When I was trying to decide on how to narrow this claim to more specific terms, I started to think about what kind of environmental problems affect me the most. The first word that came to mind was pollution. There are many parameters for a suitable environment for life. These include temperature, pressure, salinity, acidity, water and good oxygen content. Any type of air pollution could dissolve these parameters. It seemed that air pollution is such a large environmental problem that I knew my search should be narrowed. I chose to discuss pollution caused by cars because raising the gas tax and prices are part of my claim. I went to the Internet and ran a search for "car pollution," and found a large amount of information. It became even clearer to me that car pollution is a major problem for our environment. According to The Environmed Research Inc, driving a car is the most polluting act an average citizen commits (2001). Vehicle engines emit many types of pollutants into the air, including nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, particulates, sulfur dioxide and lead. All of these can pose environmental risks and health risks. Most of these pollutants rise from the engine. These emissions are related to the fuel type and the temperature of the fuel combustion. At low speeds, and when engines are at idle, the products of incomplete combustion dominate. When the speeds are heightened, however, impurities like nitrogen are oxidized to nitrogen dioxide, which creates pollution. All of the pollutants mentioned above are known as trace gases. Some of these trace gases can even release completely new gases into the atmosphere (Environmental Effects, 2001).