Reply #34: You seem not to care about practicalities...

[Solon]

First, about 426,476,800 acres of land in the United States is arable, i.e. you can grow crops on it. Ethanol(from corn) produces a grand total of 18 gallons per acre every year, leading to a grand total of about 7,676,582,400 gallons of Ethanol produced a year, IF you use ALL that land to grow fuel only, we don't need to eat, after all. :eyes:

Seems like a lot of fuel, until you realize that the U.S. consumes over 20 million barrels a day, 1 US gallon equals 0.0322580645 barrels. So that means a total of 247,631,690.1987648 barrels of ethanol is produced a year, that's almost 150 days, now where do we get the OTHER half the the year's worth of oil?

Please bear in mind that these calculations assume that all petroleum derived herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers are used to grow this fuel, in contrast all machines on the farms happen to be perpetual motion machines.

The fact of the matter is that it really isn't fair to compare us to Brazil, considering they have HALF our population and about half of our automobile ownership, per capita, which means, overall they would burn at most one quarter of the fuel we do. Just like you can't say we should adopt Iceland's "hydrogen only" policy, simply because Iceland happens to be in a damned near unique position of having near unlimited free energy(geothermal), hence Hydrogen is economical there, but practically no where else.

In addition, yes I know that other fuels/plants are better at providing fuel per acre, however many of the highest yield plants happen to NOT grow here in any quantity, so we would have to import the fuel in the first place, or they only grow in limited areas, or are energy intensive to grow and extract the oil. In addition, you can't really sacrifice too much of our food production, we could suffer from mass starvation, and that is no exaggeration. That is NOT a hit we can absorb.

There is no free lunch, there is no magic bullet technology, the FIRST, and BEST thing to do is to CUT CONSUMPTION, period, end of story. If Americans have to give up their cars, so be it, its not like we will have any choice in the near future anyways.