Update on the Energy bill:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070622/ap_on_go_co/congress_energy

As it turns out, the new standard on auto fuel economy will be 35 mile per gallon, not 52, as was orignally proposed and quoted in the above post and extraction....quite a difference. And all this by the year 2020.
Opinion: Technology will have so antiquated these standards by 2020, they will be as useless as the infamous red flag act at the birth of the auto age.

If the CAFE standars are idiotic by being so low over such a long time span as to be completely meaningless, the ethanol plan suffers from being so grandious as to be farcical, akin to Swift's castles in the air:

"The legislation would require ethanol production for motor fuels to grow to at least 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase over the amount of ethanol processed last year."

That comes out to around 2.4 million barrels per day (check my math) or roughly 10% of current U.S. gasoline consumption, i.e., roughly the level "gasahol" would consume. So forget big volumes of E85, even the guv'ment don't see it happening. But the consumption increase in natural gas and corn will be staggering just to pull that little bit off. If you thought solar to hydrogen was not "scalable" wait until you see this mess. Solar to produce distributed hydrogen will look as easy as a high school science project by comparison.

So, what's the one bet we can safely make based on current reading of this energy bill? Buy corn.

Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
(and we ain't gettin' there on alcohol :-)