Hm.

I'm actually of two minds about the ethanol situation; corn ethanol seems a lot less destructive to me than a lot of other things we do in order to prop up agribusiness, and I don't believe that corn/soy ethanol are behind the rise in food prices, simply because we have increased production in corn in the past few years by a greater margin than we've been diverting it for ethanol production.

Also, as Zubrin points out in Energy Victory, enhanced world-wide markets for crops that can be used for biofuels (which, as the research rolls along, will be darn near anything, including a lot of material that grows well in the developing world) will lift a lot of people out of poverty, because if ethanol use goes up, the richer countries can lift that tariffs that keep poor countries poor.

But let's look back at Brazil for a moment, and remember that part of the reason they are energy-independent is that their consumers have a choice in which types of fuels they use: because most of their vehicles are flex-fuel, their petrochemical companies have to compete with their biofuels. Service stations are required to have pumps that dispense both types of gas.

How to give ourselves the same flexibility? (And I'm still borrowing from Zubrin, here.) Well, we could impose huge overhead costs on gas stations, by requiring each one to add an ethanol pump or two (for thousands of dollars), or we could impose a miniscule cost on the car companies by requiring that new cars be flex-fuel (which adds $100-$500) to the cost of each vehicle, and would lead the market to get ethanol—and methanol—pumps into our filling stations. (Yes: our cars must be able to take all three kinds of fuel: ethanol, methanol, and gasoline. And that goes for hybrids, too. Even the electric type. As the power grid expands to accommodate plug-in "mostly electric" hybrids, those "backup" internal combustion engines shouldn't be handcuffed to petroleum. After all, we don't want motorists stranded as we continue to work on those nuclear power plants, wind farms, and solar panels.)

I mean, I like a laissez faire policy as much as the next girl. But that isn't what we have now anyway, and energy is ultimately a national defense issue as much as anything else. We do much worse when we pay farmers not to grow anything than we do when we pay them to grow corn so we can continue to research biofuels.

I don't think the future of biofuels lies in corn or soy, but we have to start somewhere while we drill for more oil, work on methanol, and get algae to yield ethanol in a cost-effective way.

The trick is—for the next two decades, at least—to make our vehicles into energy sluts.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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