[fabsroman]

GOB,

You make some really good points, and when one of our cars finally dies, which I hope is not for a decade, I will be in a really good position to decide on hybrid or ethanol because the manufacturers will have had plenty of time to work the bugs out and I will be able to determine how hard it is to get ethanol.

Maybe, just maybe, if farming actually becomes profitable, farmers will be less likely to sell their farms out the developers and we won't have all this crappy sprawl. That should also give us more places to hunt, and if crops become that valuable I am willing to bet that farmers wouldn't want deer or geese eating them up, so they would be more apt to give hunters permission to hunt, kind of like how Rocky gets permission every year to hunt prairie dogs and had the farm owner begging him to come out this year. God, that would be nice.

I did note a couple of places where I could argue with you about the cost to produce ethanol. For instance, if food costs are driven up across the board, not just beer, but bread, milk, butter, etc., are we really in a better position. Most people can move closer to work and avoid the cost of fuel, but it is somewhat hard for some of us to eat less even though we have an obesity problem in the US. Some other issues were with the transport of ethanol. Ethanol cannot be transported via pipelines because it destroys the pipelines. So, it has to be transported via truck, which can make it rather tough. Another issue is this, do we really know how deadly an ethanol spill is? Is ethanol harmful if it is spilled into the ocean, or does it just evaporate? I don't know the answer to this one, so I am asking about it so I can be more knowledgeable in this debate later on.