Running on Alcohol

In the spirit of Earth Day, which is a holiday celebrated mostly by greenies, tree huggers, liberals, commies, and generally anyone who is against progress, it’s time for a renewable energy update.

There’s been a lot of talk about a substance called “ethanol” on the radio today. Finally, somebody besides me and the knowledgeable greenies in this country (all 2 of them) became interested in this topic.

Just what is ethanol? It’s a fuel that can be used in most vehicles that are made today, that does not come from any form of petroleum such as crude oil. It’s also renewable, meaning there is an unlimited supply of it, unlike petroleum oil and space shuttles.

Where did ethanol come from? To answer that question, we have to go back several hundred years to the dawn of this country, when jobs were scarce and many were poor. In order to pass the time, the poor men desired to drink, but couldn’t afford to buy beer, since they had no jobs.

Enter George Washington, who later became King George I of America (not to be confused with King George I of England ). Our first king invented the distillation of feedstock such as corn and sugar cane, in order to produce an alcohol that was cheap to make and tasted horrible, but nonetheless allowed the poor to get drunk and thus provide comic relief to the working people.

The technology rapidly spread across the world, later being adapted by the Russians to a more constructive use called the Molotov Cocktail, which enabled people to get drunk and light other people on fire at the same time!

Late in the next century, an American invented an automobile that ran on, you guessed it: gasoline, a derivative of crude oil that had no known use except for starting massive fires.

Late last century, Al Gore, who is best known for inventing the internet, which runs on clean fuel such as coal and cow manure, discovered that the gasoline engine was the single greatest threat to mankind. Oddly, it was discovered earlier by people that actually have brains, that the same engine, with slight modifications, can run on ethanol. So he stands corrected: the ethanol engine is now the greatest threat to mankind.

How come you haven’t heard of this? Well, the media would love to do their job of reporting important information such as this to you, the consumer, but if they did, that would distract them of their constant bashing of President Bush (also known as King George III). It would also undermine their blaming of the president for increasing gas prices, since we all know that he was also appointed king of the Middle East , and now controls the world’s oil supply.

See, if ethanol is widely produced in the US , which it could be, it would undercut the cost of gasoline and decrease the number of death threats to gasoline attendants. Such is currently the case in Brazil, where they discovered that, as people’s desire to grow fat decreased, so did their sales of sugar cane. So they transformed their sugar cane industry into the world’s largest ethanol industry.

In Brazil , all cars run on E85 now, a blend of 85% ethanol, with 15% gasoline added to prevent drunks from hijacking ethanol tankers and then crashing them. Ethanol is one of Brazil ’s largest exports, and their citizens pay less to fill up their tanks of gas than anywhere else in the civilized world.

So what are we going to do about this? Simple: we will continue to blame the president and other elected politicians for oil prices and anything else that’s wrong with the world. Then we’ll elect the same people again in the next election, and nothing will ever change. In the meantime, we’ll keep buying gasoline and giving oil companies record profits every year. Why? Because this is America , and ignorance is bliss!

Doug Cooke is a political analyst and philosopher.