Personally I have my doubts about ethanol as our great hope for energy independence. It takes a lot of processing and a lot of energy to make ethanol from corn... but we can make BEER with less energy... hmmm.

The other problem is that if we want to fight greenhouse gases we need to be fixing carbon and absorbing carbon dioxide, not giving it off during processing :

"Co-Products. There are two main co-products created in the production of ethanol: distillers grain and carbon dioxide. Distillers grain, wet or dry, is a valuable livestock feed. Carbon dioxide is given off in great quantities during fermentation and many ethanol plants collect, compress, and sell it for use in other industries. "

http://www.ethanol.org/howethanol.html

The most promising approach I have seen is biodiesel... a mix of about 85% oil produced directly from an algae bed and 15% ethanol produced in the current way. The downside is that you need a diesel engine instead of a regular gasoline engine, but the upside is that MUCH less processing is required (no harvesting, no fermentation, no distillation) and at first glance the CO2 production seems to be much less.

The only way we're going to fix the CO2 levels is either to replant a few million square miles of forest (unlikely) or start pulling a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere back into fuel products. I think we're actually going to have to do both, which is going to be a real challenge unless we get our population growth under control.

Canada is still addicted to immigration for population growth and growing our way out of our accumulated debt... and I imagine the US is going to be thinking the same way after the deficits of the last few years. Trouble is that we have to keep chopping down forests and building on farmers fields in order to accomodate the ever-growing population, and we're not going to fix the carbon problem that way.

Our government's commitment to the Kyoto summit is a dangerous joke; regrettably very few up here seem to understand that. At least the US government had the intelligence not to sign the protocol without a viable plan to actually DO something about it.

IMO biodiesel is the solution.

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