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.
Trillions of dollars invested by independent business people and their companies, vs government handouts. That doesn't make a level playing field, that artificially waves systems that have been examined in the crucible of the economic marketplace and discarded as being a waste of time. But somehow these will be all different when people who get paid to spend government money, who build industries around spending government money, are told to develop a new fuel source, and gosh, so long as they continue to fail, they'll get more and more money. That's not leveling the playing field - that's bulldozing it, covering the ground with salt, and then trying to develop a system to cope with the salt - because salt's the problem, not the people who put it there.
Here are listed dozens of oil subsidies; http://www.icta.org/doc/Real%20Price%20of%20Gasoline.pdf
Did you bother to read the report you cite? I can't imagine you did, and posted it on a conservative forum. The yearly cost of parking lots is 200 billion? Oh, yes, alternative fuel sources will oh so deeply affect that. 8 billion because roads impact bicyclists? Travel costs? Urban sprawl? How does any of that become affected by fossil fuels unless the sole goal of the report is to advocate that we all live in stacked crates of high density housing, all use communal transportation, and... Wait, a socialist utopia of sheep - that's the goal of the report.
It is a national priority issue to get out from under our dependence on our enemies for a critical commodity like imported oil.
But that's not the goal of the report you cited - the goal of the report you cited was to eliminate roads, personally owned transportation, parking structures, independent living, etc. Yes, producing things /here/ is ideal - it's a standard goal of most on here to buy American; it's my goal too. But the biggest obstacle to buying American are the same morons who produced the report you cited - industry is bad, therefore we want to prevent industry from growing. So we have to rely more and more upon imported production, of fossil fuels as well as the material goods such as the computer you're using, because making it here is just HORRIBLE, just horrible...
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.
So stop supporting the ecofreaks by quoting their reports as if they mean the slightest thing, rather than simply agreeing to build what they want you to build. As every other socialist idea they've had has proved to be ultimately, an utter failure. If it's not, then ask all those people living in the communal projects we built if their lives are better for it.