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Some people scoff at renewables, too expensive, big adjustment, car mechanics can't keep up, etc. Bull. As George W. pointed out, in probably the best sentence I think I heard from him in the whole 8 years, "We are addicted to oil". We have a monster of a petro-monkey on our backs, and, unless we put our thinking caps on, we're going to have the same monkey in 2109. We'll all be dead by then, sure, but wouldn't it be a grand thing to hand off an energy-independent United States, even if it is awash in red ink, to whoever follows onstage next? The story of petroleum only spans about 90 years. Sure, they were drilling in the 1800's, the late 1800's, but things really didn't hit full swing with oil and gasoline until the 1900's, and 20 years later, the whole middle east oil field thing happened. Everything since then has been a fiscal whirlwind, you've got people like Howard Hughes, Sr. wrapped up in the story, and countries like Saudi Arabia, right on up to W. himself, along with Cheney and Rice. The oil moguls did run our country, for all intents and purposes, maybe not officially, but ran it nonetheless. Soooo...here we are in a recessional, and looking at things like ethanol to help keep the economy going. You hear different things about ethanol, but one thing you don't hear is that you can run the tractor that's out there harvesting the crops off 'farmer's fuel'. Indeed. Past a certain amount to get the crops started, you can pretty much dispense with dispensing diesel on the farm. A little engine work, and your tractor will run off alcohol. Good stuff, there. And, if you can run a tractor off it, you can run anything else off it. The E10-E20 mixtures have an added bonus of high octane. In english, that's pronounced, 'performance', horsepower, smooth running engines, and also another bonus of low emissions. No more witches' brew of groundwater-polluting MTBE, either. Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether, I think it is, and it's a petroleum-derived alcohol, but was determined to not be eco-groovy, and apparently not that good at reducing emissions, either. There's another problem, though, that won't be solved by even the greenest of fuels, not even if you put dandelions with love messages tied to them directly into the fuel tank(that'll play hell with the fuel pump, eh? LOL). The sheer number of cars on the road is what I'm getting at. The traffic system in some major cities is already at, or even past what the roads can handle in terms of volume. Imagine a thousand energy-efficient cars sitting still on the freeway, their magic eco-engines turning over, with their low emissions, burning fuel anyway because that's what an engine does besides get hot and move the car forward, and still going nowhere fast because of the phenomenon known as 'gridlock'. Are cars 'bad'? No. But, transporation as we know it has systemic problems. You can only fix X number of cars in Y square area of road space during time-span Z, and if you exceed it, you either have accidents, or traffic jams, or even traffic jams caused BY accidents. How about ethanol buses? They're trying that/have done it in some areas, but eventually you have traffic jams with just buses in them. Any way you slice it, eco-fuels have some distinct advantages, economic, political, environmental, but there's still the simple basic fact that growth beyond a certain point for a given urban/sub-urban area spells systemic doom in terms of timely transit and transportation, which was the whole reason for having cars and roads in the first place. What to do...what to do...how about ethanol MOTORCYCLES? They take up less room, light on emissions to begin with because of the smaller engines...and the original motorcycles were motorized bicycles...dual drive, pedal or engine...we'll think of something, I'm sure. Klaatu marachas necktie