If ethanol was a valid and productive fuel, why is it mandated by states, and supported with a fifty-cent a gallon subsidy? There’s no subsidy on the beer in the fridge, why on ethanol?
Several things.
Beer is not competing against gasoline and beer at 5 percent alcohol or so is not nearly strong enough to power your car.
Nothing now known can compete against highly subsidized gasoline. We have spent 75 years or so and trillions of dollars on developing it into a viable fuel and it is still far from perfect. What we need to do is eliminate the subsidies on both oil and alternatives, but there are powerful forces protecting the oil subsidies. In the mean time, we need to put the alternatives on a level playing field with still highly subsidized oil for the reasons here stated
Here are listed dozens of oil subsidies;
http://www.icta.org/doc/Real%20Price%20of%20Gasoline.pdf
It is a national priority issue to get out from under our dependence on our enemies for a critical commodity like imported oil.
We are exporting billions of dollars out of our economy to our enemies and we need to keep the money here at home for our own economy.
If we had the political guts to tell the ecofreaks where to go we might drill more of our own oil and build new refineries to replace our antique facilities. We can not manage to do that so the alternative fuels are the next means of achieving the above economic and strategic goals.