Yes, Bob, I understand... You've looked at life from both sides now... as the female folk vocalist of the 1970's sang... and this is your safety perch from which you can appear wise as a moderate old owl! The wisest person in the room, so to speak.
Have you ever defended the timber industry from the radical GovernMental EnvironMentalist despots who have ruined it's great and sustainable traditions??? If you have, you are certainly a rarity indeed!!!
If I could get to know you better, I'll bet I'd find you to be an American of excellent character and more productive than most. But this fadish casting about for alternative energy or raw materials is kinda dumb on it's face.
If ANY of these alternatives were viable, they'd have been adopted long before this simply through the demand for supply of the most viable by our system of markets!!!
Thus, I see all this speculating and daydreaming as sophomoric sophistry and smacking of negativity toward our own traditions of a sort that smacks of liberalism, or that there's something wrong with what America has been doing because we're not all hyped up over trying to fix something that really isn't broken in the first place...
Now if you think that those statements are filled with wrath directed soley at you, then don't even give it a "soft answer" and I'll understand.
Not at all. It's what we've always done. No matter what the product or the process, innovators have always struggled to find alternatives, in order to provide a choice, a better market position, or to take advantage of a previously underutilized resource. Just consider the efforts of George Washington Carver.
"If ANY of these alternatives were viable, they'd have been adopted long before this simply through the demand for supply of the most viable by our system of markets!!!"
Some of the alternatives are indeed viable, and additional studies will disclose methods by which they may be made even more competitive. Nearly a hundred years ago, you could fill up your Model T with either alcohol or gasoline. You had a choice, depending on what may have been more plentiful in your area.
Obviously, alcohol was not able to continue to compete against alcohol directly. It lost out in straight competition to the more available and easily provided petrochemically derived gasoline.
But as has been stated above, as gasoline and other petro stocks rise in price due to increasing demand, at some point alcohols of various types will again become price competitive, even without subsidization. Simple economics dictates that it must be so. Why fight against a rising tide?