It seems ethanol has emerged as the best opportunity to relax our dependence on foreign oil. In that context, the “cost” of developing an alternative to oil can’t be measured only in dollars.
Right now, oil is costing us lives. And it’s only going to get more costly.
I'll stay out of the ethanol fight for now. But I don't believe terrorism will stop if we were to immediately find other sources of fuel.
These people want to see us dead...period. It's not really about oil that our brave lives are being lost.
It's about radical islam vs everyone else. Since we are the biggest other target, we will always be in their crosshairs.
We could get oil a lot cheaper if we ditched the boondoggles like ethanol and let the market for innovation operate. Going whole hog for ethanol would cause the price of making the ethanol rise as steeply as that of making oil by present means and it would completely disrupt our present agricultural system. We don’t have the water, for example, in places like California, to grow the extra crops. In the Midwest we would accelarate topsoil depletion beyond ocntrol and in the East we don’t have the space. The combination of big government, big ethanol and big oil along with big auto is presently avoiding better technology rather than suffer any disruption. Big environment is also part of the dance by insisting on exotic things that are marginal. Big oil goes along with this dance to show its good intentions so long as it doesn’t disrupt the way things are presently done.