Can Cars Run On Trees? - Forbes.com: "HOUSTON -- Ethanol is, for the most part, a federally funded boondoggle that wastes piles of taxpayer money, mountains of corn and lakes worth of groundwater to make a transportation fuel vastly inferior to petroleum-derived gasoline both in energy content and portability.
Congress in 2007 mandated that by 2021 the nation use 36 billion gallons of ethanol a year--roughly one-third of our transportation needs. Right now, we're at roughly 11.5 billion gallons a year. Meeting the mandate without massive subsidies will take some serious scientific genius--especially when it comes to devising an economic way to make cellulosic ethanol out of trees and other plants we don't eat. Most of the nation's 1,500 or so biofuel upstarts will fail. The ones that survive will have figured out a better way to crack the cellulosic nut."
