Let’s be honest about ethanol.

It may be a good additive for gasoline but it won’t replace fossil fuels in America. And the reason is simple.

We can’t convert all the existing food-crops and fertile land into fuel producing assets without raising the price and availability of food. Nor can we rely on ‘leftovers’ from crop production since the stalks and chaff are presently used as fertilizer and animal feed, which again would lead to higher prices for farm products down the line.

So where will Americans get the additional crops needed to produce ethanol? How about we grow it ourselves!

Now let’s assume each person in the United States has a fertile yard and they plant corn, sugarcane or beets in hopes of producing ethanol. Assume also that each growing season provides ample rainfall with a minimum of destructive weather and bug infestation.

Odds are long, but let’s say everybody brings in a hefty crop. Now, where will they ship their raw product for distillation into ethanol? And how much fuel will be needed to send tons of beets and corn somewhere for processing, and how much fuel will be needed to churn the harvest into fuel? The experts say the best and most efficient systems of production take more than three quarters of a gallon to make and distribute one gallon of ethanol. Wow, it uses a lot of fuel to make ethanol.

Ok, it’s not efficient to make ethanol, but it’s still better than the one and a half gallons it takes to put a single gallon of gasoline in your car (yes for every gallon of gasoline, you’re actually buying two and a half gallons).

Humm … since everything is so inefficient, why don’t we Americans show our can-do attitude and simply make ethanol in our own side-yard distillery? After all ethanol is a gussied-up name for moonshine and most of your rural stalwarts already own a boiler and some coil tubing … so voila, a cottage industry is born that further cements the relationship between alcohol and our addiction to driving.

Sure we’d have to burn off the trees to heat up the mash but we’re stripping the land bare anyway and nothing can stand in the way of fuel for our two-ton vehicles. And the smoky pall across the nation from burning all those trees might be a nuisance for a while but remember, ethanol burns cleaner and besides science has shown people get used to pollutants with only a slight increase in mortality rates.

But let’s come back to Earth and get a reality check here: at the end of the day, nobody can make enough white lightening in their back yard to supply the fuel that their vehicles use in a year. In fact there are not enough bark scraps, lawn clippings or leaf litter in the entire nation to make what we consume in gasoline. And if we scrape up every piece of mulch to make fuel, then where will tomorrow’s dirt come from?

So unless we want food prices to skyrocket, or every stitch of vegetation to disappear off our planet, America needs a new goal besides ethanol.

Gasoline is good. Let that be our mantra, so instead of using common sense and downsizing our vehicles as a national goal, we should continue on the same path that got us here and focus first on slurping dry Canada’s oil sands before we start chopping into the earth to mine our own rich resources of oil shale.

Yes right here in the United States we have vast quantities of oil reserves locked inside ordinary grey-colored rock, and all we have to do is dig up whole areas like Dallas-Ft Worth to pull it out of the ground. But when you need a gallon of gas, anything goes and most folks understand that, especially if you’re from Texas.

Gene Haynes