Ethanol is a boondoggle for the reasons you mention and others.  By far the best and simplest solution to reduce both carbon emissions and our dependence on foreign oil is electric cars -- plug-ins and hybrids. 

It seems such an obvious solution.  Electricity can be produced in a variety of ways and we already have a distribution system.  The biggest hurtle is how to store it in the car -- that is, the batteries.

I've been following the development of the Tesla for a couple of years now because I do hope they will succeed in their business plan.  They plan to build down from their very elegant $92,000 sports car to a $50,000 family SUV and eventually to even more economical models.

On May 1, 2007, Martin Eberhad, CEO and Founder of Tesla Motors testified before the Senate Finance Committee (pdf) primarily to argue for a level playing field regarding tax incentives.  In that testimony, he explained how his battery of choice piggy-backs on the battery technology of used by other consumer electronics.  He didn't have to invent his own battery which keeps production costs down.  But there is a problem with doing that:

"Here is the thing: practically all commodity cells today are made in Asia – mainly Japan, South Korea, and China. There is no significant production anywhere in the US. Even American battery companies – such as A123, Valance, and AltairNano – turn to Asia for mass production. As James Woolsey noted shortly after taking a test drive in a Tesla Roadster, this will become a national security problem as we become more dependent on stored electricity."

Outsourcing is eventually going to ruin us.

Eberhad does offer a solution and he may now be well on his way to accomplishing it.  Tesla Energy Group was formed a couple of weeks after his testimony.

I really want an electric car.

There is an excellent article on biofuels in the October 2007 issue of National Geographic. Corn-based ethanol is very inefficient from the point of view of producing CO2-- in fact, there is little or no CO2 savings using corn-based ethanol. Also, it is HEAVILY subsidized: perhaps as much as 51%.

Ethanol obtained from sugar cane is much more energy efficient -- Brazil is the world leader in producing ethanol from sugar cane. The entire plant is used. But sugar prices in this country are artificially high because of import duties on sugar cane. Cuba could produce lots of low cost ethanol.

Biodiesel from soybeans is more energy-efficient than corn-based ethanol. But diverting land use to crops for fuel results in higher food prices. One solution is cellulosic ethanol -- produced from corn stalks, switch grass, bio-waste. This uses enzymes to break down cellulose into sugar; then one ferments the sugar. All sorts of "bio-waste" could be used to produce fuel: corn stalks, wheat stalks, grasses, etc.

In fact, bio-waste is potentially a huge fuel source. Animal feed lots have a nasty habit of dumping the animal waste into rivers and streams, resulting in fish kills and pollution. That waste could be processed to generate methane, which is essentially natural gas and can be used to power cars and busses. The residue can be used as fertizlier. Many of the busses in Sweden and Denmark run on methane produced from the decay of animal wastes. There is some, but not a lot, of activity in this direction in this country.

McDonalds, and all the fast food restaurants could purify their cooking oils after use and these oils could be used as bio-diesel. Diesel's first engine ran on peanut oil.

There are plenty of available technological solutions to the twin problems of our energy dependence and global warming. The obstructions are largely political.

Rumor has it that ethanol producers are shipping by rail to blending facilities.  4k to 5k railroad tankers are being built per year to meet expected demand.  Rail is quite efficient.  

Neoboho

We need to develop other energy sources -- wind, solar, hydroelectric among them -- for generating electric power. 

Of course we do but that is the beauty of electricity, it can be produced in so many different ways.  However, I disagree that we would not be saving anything.  We use most of our imported petroleum for transportation and it is the greatest source of pollution.  Switching to electric cars, especially in urban settings, would have the quickest and biggest impact of any of the proposals I've seen so far.  Unfortunately no one has yet developed a silver bullet solution.

A day or two ago there was a news article about a business venture set up by California's PG&E, Florida's FPL, and a company working on solar-thermal power systems. Those systems are huge fields of mirrors all reflecting sunlight on a central water boiler, with the resulting steam used to generate electricity. Their first such plant would be in California and would produce 350 megawatts of power, as I recall. Now, this is progress.

Electricity already has distribution networks, and the production can be remote from the users. So, these big mirror farms can be sited in deserts and open prairie land, with lots of sunlight and few people. It is ideas like this, as simple as it is, that can be the effective way to reduce both CO2 emissions and oil usage.

I agree that the electric car, the plug-in hybrid, looks like the future in personal transportation. Another simple idea with a big payback.

Hoppy in Sacramento

"Merely saying we want to tax carbon doesn't suppress the market demand for oil even at a 25% increase in price"

If the price of petroleum were to increase by 25%, solar power and other alternative energy sources, such as windmills, would become more competivive, as would gasoline-electric hybrid cars. And if the revenue raised from a carbong tax were used to subsidize solar power and gasoline-electric hybrids, this would significantly reduce the demand for petroleum.

Maybe instead of occupying Iraq to get access to its oil, we should occupy Cuba to get access to its sugar cane fields.

(Sarcasm)

There are two sides to a market, so far only supply is being discussed. The more important factor is demand. When demand is discussed, it is in the context of "conservation". Conservation has a mixed record. When something becomes more efficient (autos after the oil embargo) then it is possible to consume more without spending more. So cars got more MPG, but the number increased as did the miles driven. After 30 years we are using more gasoline then before.

Cutting demand is something else. It is not discussed because our economic model is based upon capitalism and capitalism depends upon growth. In order for a firm to pay back its investors with interest it needs to get bigger. In our present financial environment Wall Street demands firms grow each year, but not only that, but that the rate of growth increase as well. This is mathematically impossible over the long term.

A permanent decline in demand would throw our entire economic system into a tizzy as can be seen in the present panic over the possibility of a recession.

I've long advocated moving to a steady-state economy. That is one where consumption does not exceed the amount of renewable resources. The world has lived in this type of environment for most of its history. Consume more than was sustainable and you starved next year.

Aside from the ideological and institutional bias against change there are the real questions of what such a society would look like. Some of the problems to be overcome include overpopulation (another 3 billion people by 2050), depletion of fresh water and arable land, loss of local production, exurban sprawl and population shift to unsuitable environments such as the American Southwest and a lack of new energy technologies.

What will the commuter in greater Phoenix do when gasoline is $10 per gallon? There is no mass transit to shift to. How much will California oranges cost in NYC? How will they get there? What will happen to the Columbian flower trade which is flown to the US daily?

Taxes and other economic measures can promote innovation, but they can't guarantee it. Moderating consumption doesn't require new technology (although it may require new infrastructure), it just requires becoming less wasteful and profligate. What is wrong with tap water, after all?

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

...

there is no silver bullet. Moreover, electric power generated by coal or oil is highly pollutiong.

Another potential source of biodiesel is, as it turns out, the smokestacks of coal fired power plants. A company has developed a method of using algae to clean the exhaust of CO2. The algae are of a type that grow extremely well when expose to air that is high in CO2. They use the CO2 through photosynthesis to live and grow.

Then the algae can be harvested and used to produce biodiesel. In fact, they produce more biodiesel from the same acreage than any other plant source.

You can read about it here:

The main company developing this is GreenFuel Technologies

Biodiesel is the only choice that makes sense when it comes to biofuels. It takes twice as much ethanol to get the same power you get from gasoline. Half the fuel mileage as a result. Diesel on the other hand gets more power than gas, better mileage. Plus there's a lot more sources of biodiesel that actually make sense economically.

Ethanol is a nice idea, if only to slightly cut auto emissions. But of course it's not economical. First, it decreases mileage. Second, simple math shows you that vodka costs $30 a gallon.

I like sticking it to non-alkie yahoo countries by diluting their only resouce with our national pastime, but it's not sustainable, not an alternative fuel.

I don't suppose anyone would agree the whole ethanol scam was only meant to market all that surplus corn grown by all those family farmers.

But we're not going to be running our cars on Bacardi 151.

rdf brings up capitalism without understanding it and raised a canard of crashing the economy.

Why do Western Europeans and Japan have broadly comparable economies as the US but use significantly less energy per capita to achieve same? 70 or 60% as measured in oil equivalent.

Yes, they don't "have" to drive so far but that's only a small part of the answer. They have consistently priced energy higher which concentrates the mind wonderfully. All the governments decided independently it was in their interest to discourage inefficient use, particularly of petroleum products which represented capital outflow, so they are and have been generally 2-3 times as expensive as here. Hence the smaller, gas/diesel-efficient cars

Why has this not adversely affected their economies? Because it is only a bias in the economy. Taxes raised on gas means lower taxes elsewhere (disregarding their overall higher tax rates).

As long as the pricing change is not dislocating, the economy will adjust smoothly.

Electricity is obviously the neatest solution, and the obvious "clean" sources are wind, wave, tide, hydro, solar. Carbon-based production can include sequestration or biological CO2 capture as noted above.

Whatever the source, inclulding nuclear, looking at the CO2 footprint, one must look at the whole cost, from birth to death, building to demolishing/recycling of the plant, the costs of the other waste -- whether spent nuclear fuel or mercury -- as well as the process cost during production.

The best way to do this is to have an effective CO2 tax which feeds through everything. That would mean higher taxes on petroleum, natural gas, coal and all forms of energy production that produces CO2.

The stimulus would be to reduce demand for those fuels unless they could effectively recapture the CO2, and to build cheaper sources of energy that do not produce CO2.

Given that we need to stabilize the CO2 levels of the planet, it is CO2 that is the target, not the method of energy production. So this tax needs to rise over time until the goal is achieved. That's economics.

And every industrialized and industrializing economy needs to follow this path. Our kids' world depends on it.

Out in my area of the West Coast there is not much interest in ethanol, and it hasn't really been very readily available.

For people who live in metropolitan areas, use of public transportation is becoming more in vogue. Rapid transit trains are slowly (with a lot of kicking and screaming) being built. The service still does not really meet the needs of most commuters. They will have a run which will take Seattleites south to the airport next year.

So many West Coasters have such long commutes, and must travel too far away from convenient or even possible public transportation, that what works in large cities in the east does not work well here.

There is some interest in electric cars,particularly very small ones in larger cities such as Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, SanFrancisco, L.A. but for more rural residents or people who must travel very long distances, beyond the charge of the current electric technology, it is not practically usable. Also, there is the problem that the electricity is not necessarily produced greenly in many parts of the country.

Hybrids are gaining in popularity, though some have not been as reliable. And there is much interest in bio-diesel. One WA State Senator drives a diesel VW Jetta and has championed getting a large bio-diesel manufacturing facility built in Grays Harbor County which will be on line soon. In the near future, bio-diesel will be readily available at many stations.

Diesel cars are getting hard to find out here, particularly new ones, as they are being snapped up very quickly. The used models at the VW lot are not priced much below the new ones, due to the supply and demand situation.

I wrote a reply which failed to post, however this discussion today covers the same points I tried to make. You can read it two ways, as a technical discussion of bio-fuels or as a political discussion about how society needs to be transformed so as to live within sustainable limits.

I'll just add that economic incentives (or disincentives) can provide motivation for technological innovation but can't guarantee it. The idea that science will find a way is a hope not a truism.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Al Gore:

...also praised a proposal by Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Chris Dodd to enact a carbon tax on polluters. "I'm convinced that we should eliminate the payroll tax and replace it dollar for dollar with a (carbon) tax," he said....

from A.P.,
Gore Likely to Endorse Before Primaries
By BETH FOUHY – Sep 4, 2007