Word: ethanol
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...even her critics say that Nonaka may simply have been ahead of her time. Better-financed companies are attempting the same kind of corporate reinvention with more success. Archer Daniels Midland, the U.S. food-processing giant, has become a hot stock-market play as America's largest producer of ethanol, an alternative fuel. "The direction toward environmental issues is the right one," says Tatsuya Mizuno, an analyst with Fitch Ratings. But it's too soon for some CEOs to bet that going green will get them...
...Nonaka may simply have been ahead of her time. Other, better-financed companies are redefining their images by moving aggressively into environmentally friendly products. For example, Archer Daniels Midland, the U.S. food-processing giant, has become a hot stock-market play because it is America's largest producer of ethanol, an alternative fuel seen as a way to reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports. "The direction towards environmental issues is the right one," says Tatsuya Mizuno, an analyst with Fitch Ratings. But it's too soon for CEOs to bet their jobs on the expectation that going green will...
Biofuels, however, are the real growth science, particularly after President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address, called for the U.S. to quintuple its production of biofuels, primarily ethanol. That was good news to American corn farmers, who produce the crop from which the overwhelming share of domestic ethanol is made. But the manufacture of corn ethanol is still inefficient: the process burns up almost as much energy as it produces...
...better answer is sugarcane ethanol, which yields eight times the energy it takes to make and provides 40% of all the fuel sold in Brazil. But such ethanol causes environmental problems of its own, as forests are cleared for cane fields. Better still would be to process ethanol from agricultural waste like wood chips or the humble summer grass called switchgrass. The cellulosic ethanol they produce packs more energy than corn ethanol, but it also takes more energy to manufacture. "If you make ethanol by burning coal, you defeat the purpose," says Sarah Hessenflow Harper, an analyst for the advocacy...
...with which she has been traditionally identified, Hillary has also proposed visionary plans to address energy security and human rights policy. Breaking through the dearth of initiative among politicians tied to special interests, her $50-billion Strategic Energy Fund will incentivize the development of clean coal plants and efficient ethanol plants, make hybrid vehicles more affordable through tax breaks, reward home and small business owners for increasing efficiency, and heavily invest in groundbreaking research. Blending pragmatism with an embracing, hopeful worldview, Hillary will jumpstart America's moribund energy policy by addressing the threats posed by both global warming and hostile...