Dependence on Foreign Oil. Global Warming. Offshore Drilling. Smog. Concern about the environmental and geopolitical costs of our nation’s 140 billion–gallon a year ² gasoline addiction has never been higher. Recent polls have found that 91 percent of Americans believe our nation is facing an energy crisis³ and 86 percent say they want their government to help develop alternative energy sources.⁴

What if that energy source is already here, ready to fuel the cars we already drive? What if we could use abundant, renewable resources to produce alternative fuels to fill up our gas tanks rather than fossil fuels? What if those alternative fuels added no net greenhouse gases to the atmosphere? What if an alternative-energy future is achievable not in thirty years – but now?

Ethanol is an alternative fuel produced from renewable and sustainable resources, and has already proved to be practical, efficient, and affordable. Made by fermenting and then distilling simple sugars from corn, sugarcane, or sorghum, or from cellulosic feedstock like agricultural waste, paper pulp, or switchgrass, ethanol is nothing fancier than 200-proof grain alcohol – the kind of old-fashioned moonshine once cooked up in back-country stills.⁵

The idea of using it to fuel cars is as old as the automobile itself – Henry Ford’s Model T was designed to run on ethanol, and Thomas Midgley, the inventor of high-octane leaded gasoline, drove a car powered by an ethanol-gasoline blend to the 1921 meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers. But despite these sepia-toned origins, ethanol has some very twenty-first century aspirations. By the year 2050, ethanol could reduce American production of global-warming gases by 1.7 billion tons a year, while simultaneously reducing the release of other air pollutants like sulfur, carbon monoxide, and particulates,⁶ and move the country significantly closer to energy independence.