Getting American's Where It Hurts

When Ethanol was pushed for the first time in the last decade as TheSolution to theproblem of insane oil consumption, I was against it.

Corn is not, as the Bush administration, Republicans and even Democrats would have you to believe, a renewable resource. True, it's more renewable than fossil fuels, which you're probably going to be a bit hard pressed to find after we suck up what remains, but the problem with corn is that it isn't truly renewable.

Anyone who ever studied the Amazon River Basin in Jr. High Geography probably learned something about crop rotation. And, if you live in Small-Town America, you probably experienced it first hand.

You see, the thing about all organic life is that it's cyclical. It takes and it gives. Take the bee for instance. It takes pollen from plants and converts it to honey which, in turn, fuels the bees until they die, at which point their bodies decompose and redeposit any vitamins, minerals and calories they borrowed from the pollen to begin with. Then, a flower grows there. Crops don't differ so drastically. In order for a vegetable to be high in any particular thing, it has to derive it from the soil around it. With corn, much of the nutritional value is lost in the stalks, which are generally chopped down and dropped off to suppliment a hay bale maze somewhere in the midwest. Nevertheless, corn is notoriously hard on the soil in which it grows, meaning that the cost of growing it is a lot higher than we think.

Of course, when we're talking about human edible consumption, the cost isn't that high in a nation of excesses like ours. We don't eat that much of it and humans have an innate ability to return our wastes to the cycle. True, it's costly to grow as crops require a lot of attention but it's generally ok.

That is, until the conversation became about gasoline.

But anyway, all of that to get you to the thing that's going to hurt American's in a way that only it can and finally get us on the road to hydrogen fuel cells: BEER.