Reply #6: A Drop of Piss in the Big Bucket [View All]

[BlueJackal]

It's very well-intentioned but sadly it will do nothing to help us out. Ethanol, the main and most marketable of all the biofuels, is so expensive that billions in taxpayer funds have to be actually paid to farmers and ethanol producers to keep the fuel marketable and affordable because otherwise it's simply too expensive.
The falacy that's misleading to so many environmentalists and people like myself who are very concerned about our dependency on oil is that there is no simple pill to take to "cure" the epidemic. The only cure is to reduce demand - simply economics. Ethanol is touted by corporations like Cargill and Midwestern congressmen and senators and propped up by their pork ethanol bills that really just give people false hopes on the future. It costs more in gasoline to make ethanol than it does for ethanol to save gasoline per gallon.
Ethanol is subsidized by billions in my tax money that could be far better spent on health-care or increased infrastructure somewhere in my country. We need to stop fooling ourselves. There is no cure to oil. The "oil death" will come in about 60 years and there's nothing to stop it save converting our economy to wind, solar, and nuclear because there are no other practical "clean" ways to fund our way of life.