In the past year or so we've seen more and more people jump onto the Ethanol bandwagon.  After learning more about it (and it doesn't take very long to do some basic research) I've concluded that Ethanol advocates are idiots.  Let me be very clear: If you think Ethanol is a serious alternative fuel you either haven't researched it at all or you are too dumb to be expressing opinions.

It's actually difficult to find a "plus" to Ethanol.  I guess, in theory, it would reduce dependence on foreign oil. Which seems ironic that anyone would tolerate the negatives to deal a minor blow to middle east oil producers even as they shop at Walmart (which imports vast amounts of its "stuff" from China) on their way to a "Get our troops out of there" protest rally.

So what's wrong with Ethanol? Let's count the ways:

1) It's not carbon-neutral. Not by a long shot.  Burning a bio fuel in itself is "carbon-neutral" but producing the bio fuel in the first place (whether it be corn or switch grass) and then harvesting it and then turning it into fuel is hardly carbon-neutral.

2) It takes more than 1 gallon of fresh water to produce 1 gallon of Ethanol. Think about that for a moment.  Environmentalists talk a great deal about conserving water. But producing Ethanol is one of the worst things you can do in that area.  When someone runs their shower for a long time, at least that water is (ahem) recycled if you're living in a city.  But the fresh water used for farming and producing ethanol is not coming back to the water table or the lake or stream it came from any time soon.

3) It pollutes the air. In our rush to worry about CO2 (better known as the stuff that plants breath) people seem to forget about good old fashioned real pollution. 

But let's put away the extra pollution in Ethanol itself, let's consider the production of it which involves using massive amounts of nitrogen for fertizing it and the effect of that.  Or how about all the other things involved in raising crops.  I'm no farmer but one doesn't need to look hard to find out that the "agribusiness" is a pretty environmentally intrusive thing.  It's one thing if it's being done for food, but as an alternative to gasoline?

4) It wouldn't even come close to solving our problems. Even if we turned nearly all the ariable farm in the United States to switch grass or corn production and we switched to using corn stalks or other more efficient methods of getting bio-fuels, we still wouldn't have enough for even today's gasoline needs. 

5) Ethanol actually requires more energy to produce than it provides.  Let me be clear on this because Ethanol advocates try to side-step this by saying that all energy sources are like this.  But the difference is that Ethanol already uses more energy in the sense that it takes more gas, coal, ethanol, whatever fuels you want to use to produce ethanol than the produced ethanol will provide back.

It's a fraud.  Really wanting something to be true really badly doesn't make it true. One study showed that a gallon of Ethanol has 76k BTUs but requires 116k BTUs to produce -- before you even start transporting the stuff! In other words, it's not a close call on that point.

It's like the Simpsons episode where Homer goes into the Grease business and Bart says "That bacon you just used to produce that grease that made 50 cents cost $5." and Homer says "That's your mother's money" and Bart says "But her money comes from you." and Homer says "And my money comes from grease."

THAT's the kind of reasoning an Ethanol advocate has to use. Homer Simpson logic.

6) Ethanol has less energy in the final fuel. That means you get fewer miles per gallon on your car which means more trips to the gas station and more overall overhead.

7) Ethanol production would (obviously) raise food prices.  The government subsidizes Ethanol production. So farmers produce it instead of other grops (you know, food). Food prices go up. There have already been food riots on this.  To dumb this down so that ethanol advocates can understand: We are paying taxes so that we can pay more money for our food.

8) How do you transport Ethanol? Do advocates realize that Ethanol is a type of alcohol? (the name implies it, no?).  That means you can't use pipelines like we do for gasoline. What happens to alcohol when you mix it with water? What happens to piping if you run alcohol through it for awhile? The wikipedia page for Ethanol talks about this. But it's easy to forget that its advocates apparently don't like reading..or math.   So even if we were willing to lay waste to the land necessary to produce this stuff, how do you transport it around? By truck or train. And what powers those? Grease?

None of these facts are hard to find out. They're not part of some conspiracy by the evil oil companies.  Half of it is common sense.  Fossil Fuels, whether we like them or not, are about the closest thing we have to Energon cubes we got.

We need to get away from fossil fuels but we need to do it intelligently. Ethanol is just such a patently stupid idea on so many levels that I can't believe no one has bothered to expose it yet and discredit it once and for all.

Personally, I think plug-in hybrids are a good start. Sure, our power comes from fossil fuels but it's lot easier (and cheaper) to control what power plants emit than cars. Moreover, the US is the OPEC of coal which is what most of our power plants produce.  Better yet, use nuclear power and send the waste over to Iraq (just kidding) (not kidding, secret evil plan in progress) .

Most of our fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions come from vehicles. Give me a car that could even go 20 miles per day on electric and I'd be off of gasoline.  The answer isn't to find some new magical carbon fuel, the answer is to reduce how much our cars use IMO.