Free Republic

Alternative Energy Sources. Nothing gets my spidey-news-senses tingling like that phrase. Heh™. Want to stop enabling ME terrorists? Then find a way to quit feeding the Oil-Ticks who bleed the wealth of the Western world, and then use the proceeds to fund terrorism.

At the dawn of the automobile age, Henry Ford predicted that "ethyl alcohol is the fuel of the future." With petroleum at about $65 a barrel, President George W. Bush of the United States has embraced that view, too. But Brazil is already there. Brazil expects to become self-sufficient in energy this year, meeting its growing demand for fuel by raising output both from petroleum and ethanol. Already the use of ethanol, derived here from sugar cane, is so widespread that gas stations have two sets of pumps, marked A for alcohol and G for gasoline.

JACKSON - Hitler had one big problem in his plan to conquer the world: Germany had no oil or gas. The invasion of Russia was supposed to fix that problem, but that came to a bitter end. Germany's brilliant engineers came up with a solution. It was called Fischer-Tropsch, a complex chemical process that extracts fuel from tar, coal and lignite. These bulky raw materials were broken down into simple hydrogen and carbon molecules, then reconstituted into liquid fuel. After the failed Russian invasion, Germany embarked on a massive campaign to build the new plants.... After the war, the discovery...