Kacie Cardenas
Mr. Tall Chief
Composition 1
31 October 2012

Oil vs. Ethanol In today’s society most people get from point A to point B with a car. That car that society drives, however, doesn’t run all by itself. All cars need some form of energy to operate. The world’s primary use of energy for cars is oil. As we know, our global amount of fossil fuels, especially oil, gets a little more scarce everyday. Researchers have developed different kinds of alternative energy to help slow down the use of fossil fuels. Ethanol has turned into a top source of an alternative for oil. So why not use those alternative forms of energy like ethanol for every car? Through studies and research, scientists continue to evaluate the downside of fossil fuels, possible harm of alternative energy, the benefits of fossil fuels, and successes of alternative energy. Earth’s primary energy supplier has always been fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are made from animals and plants that lived many millions of years ago. Those plants and animals became buried underneath the surface of the Earth where they transformed into what we use today for oil. We have depended on those fuels to meet our most basic energy needs, to our most complex. Society runs into the problem that fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource. Once they have been depleted, the fossil fuels are gone forever. The problem comes up when miners, oil companies, and oil consumers destroy different ecosystems. The mining and oil production that occurs has caused a major dent our environment. When oil is refined to make gas and that gas is used in cars, it emits carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide has been considered the number one greenhouse effect that has contributed to global warming. The impact that global warming has had on the environment has been extensive to the point of creating holes in the thinning