New York City, January 30, 2006.

An educational forum regarding the production of ethanol biofuel, will take place tonight, Monday, January 30, 2006, 6pm, in Thomson Hall, at Wilson College, in CHAMBERSBURG close to the border with Maryland in south-central Pennsylvania.

The meeting was announced in The Herald-Mail of Saturday. The paper is printed in Hagerstown, Maryland, and distributed in the Pennsylvania-Maryland-Delaware tri-state area, as well as in Washington DC. The paper in 2004 was the region’s “Newspaper of the Year”. The paper’s Public Opinion City Editor, John Bechtel will be the chair at the debate’s Q&A part. The opening presentation will be by Wilson College President, Lorna Edmundson and the event is being organized by Dr. Edward Wells, chair of the Environmental Studies Department. His phone - 717- 264-4141 ext. 3413. See www.Wilson.edu and www.Herald-Mail.com

The event is being co-sponsored by Citizens for a Quality Environment and the Penn-Mar Ethanol LLC. The later is the company, that signed in February 2005 an agreement with the Letterkenny Industrial Development Authority to build an $80 million facility at the Cumberland Valley Business Park near Letterkenny Army Depot, to make up to 60 million gallons of ethanol per year from 20 million bushels of corn. The Greene Township Zoning Hearing Board decided that the facility is a permitted use in a heavy industrial zone and granted it a variance from the township’s 45-feet height limitation. That was challenged in court by opponents of the plant, and they found a friendly judge in this heavily Republican State. Now the proponents of the plant must appeal. Scott Welsh, the Penn-Mar project manager said the Monday meeting is not about the project, but about the basics of ethanol production from agriculture.

We visited the region this last Saturday and were taken to a hill 1200 feet above the land. It was a sacred site used now by hand gliders, and underneath it revealed before our eyes an unbelievably beautiful agricultural farm-area that may indeed be dying if no proper use is found for this tremendous agricultural potential.

The two speakers are:

-David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, who will discuss the benefits of ethanol, and

- Professor Tadeusz Patzeck of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley who will “talk about the downside of the alternative fuels.” We looked up on Google about his background and clearly found that he knows about oil & gas industries but has published on his opposition to biofuels. He seems to be of the same mind with Professor David Pimentel about whose activities we wrote earlier (see please the SustainabiliTank search button).

We hope that those that will attend to-night’s meeting will have an enlightening experience. Further we hope that such meetings can be hold in many more locations. We are also looking forward to this because we are afraid that president Bush, in the State of the Union speech, to morrow, may talk of making ethanol from wood chips rather then from produce like corn. The difference between the two is that what Penn-Mar wants to do was practical already years ago, while what people like Professor Pimentel, and the oil industry led US Department of Energy talk about, is not practical yet, and will not be for years to come. It is this later route that was mentioned by President Bush on last Thursday, as what he will include in his State of the Union. I hope that David Morris will delve into these aspects also, when answering false accusations of an inherent lack of energy efficiency in the production of ethanol from corn.