e a more environmental friendly gas product for our nation’s cars; this product is of course ethanol. Ethanol is a high octane, liquid, domestic and renewable fuel produced by the fermentation of plant sugars. In the United States, ethanol is typically produced from corn and other grain products, although in the future it may be economically produced from other biomass resources such as agricultural and forestry wastes, or specially grown energy crops. Conventional fossil fuels unlock carbon that has been stored for millions of years, which disrupts the balance of earth’s carbon cycle. Ethanol, on the other hand, recycles carbon from accumulated biomass into the air, thus minimizing any adverse effects. Any ethanol product can traditionally be used in a way such that a car, for instance, would run on fuel that contained a certain mixture of ethanol and gasoline, nevertheless, carbon emissions would not cause as much damage as would one-hundred percent gasoline run vehicles.Overall, the advantages of the Kyoto Protocol lie in its effect of instilling in society the need to change our current ways. The world as a whole has realized, manifested in the pages of the policy document, that we must work together to achieve our goals, and that current dynamics of energy consumption has put us on the path to complete environmental destruction. Despite these advantages, the protocol does display some disadvantages. These disadvantages, unlike the advantages, are more correlated with the actual specifications of the agreement rather than its assumptions and goals.In the front line of controversy of the Kyoto Protocol is its proposal of “emissions trading mechanisms” by which an economic system of tradable emissions certificates would allow countries to buy extra emissions, per say, from those countries who have emitted below their allotted amount. In this scenario, each country is given a specific amount of emission...
