1) Corn generated ethanol is a 'net negative' fuel in that (currently) it DOES cost more net energy to make a gallon of ethanol than you can get out of it by burning it...but there are some new proposals about how to make it more efficiently by a) microbial generation of ethanol or b) using sugar cane instead of corn as the base (this is how Brazil has become energy independent in their use and generation of ethanol, but there are climatic issues about where in the US we can successfully grow sugar cane, and some governement restrictions to 'protect' the corn farmer currently in place.)
2) Hydrogen would indeed be the perfect fuel for cars, and my understanding is that it wouldn't take that much to convert current engines to run on it, although we would have to re-equip them with fuel tanks that hold liquid hydrogen (might be interesting to see what happens to such a fuel cell in an accident!!!), and we'll need an effective way of getting the liquid hydrogen into the tank from a 'gas' station. The problem here is that (over-simplified!!!) the way to generate hydrogen in the quantities needed to change our economic base is to pass electricity through sea water (ionized water) and of course, we can always get LOTS of electricity by burning coal or
oil (
...hmmmmmm!!!!!!)
3) Short term, excessive profits for
oil companies are but a blip on the economic timescale. The Hubbert Peak for
oil is expected in 2012-2015, so GM's mandate, though noble, is somewhat like pi$$ing up a rope. We probably have 10 years to convert Western (and now Chinese and Indian) economies from oil-burning economies to 'alternate energy' economies! (theories say that even finding a new oilfield the size of the Arabian one would only move the Hubbert Peak back by maybe 7 or 8 years), and once we reach the Hubbert Peak, today's 'oil war' in Iraq will look like a knife fight at the local 7-11 once the Western democracies REALLY face an oil crisis that is essentially unsolvable! Cast your mind back ten years and think just how far (NOT) we have come in those 10 years to moving off oil as the world's energy driver and the whole scenario becomes REALLY depressing. We
could build more nuclear power plants (if only the average, numbnut citizen would get over an irrational fear of the word 'nuclear'. They even changed the name of NMR scans to MRI scans just so as not to scare folks with the term Nuclear Magnetic Resonance...jeeez!), but we are also close to the Hubbert Peak for Uranium. We DO have VAST coal reserves that would also help in the short term, but these have their own environmental issues (which we will not give a rat's about once we NEED to burn them!) and at some point there is a Hubbert Peak for coal.
The direst prediction I have read says that by the end of this century, perhaps 75% of the Earth's population will perish and we will be back to an 18th century agrarian economy!
Everything helps, of course, and so one must applaud solar energy, wind energy and biofuel research, but the ONLY long-term solution for electricity generation (and hence hydrogen production) in the mind-numbingly vast quantities that we need it is to find a way to tap the Earth's geothermal energy which is the one form of renewable energy that we have done very little to master, but is MUCH more efficient than the others (wind, solar, biofuel, hydroelectric and why is it that the FRENCH (??) are the ONLY country that have figured out how to build a wave powered electric generating station?).
I do NOT want to sound like Al Gore here (god forbid!), and mine is just one opinion, but until one of our politicians has the nuts to make this THE singularly most important issue facing the human race (which it IS!!!) we are "fiddling while Rome (or ethanol) burns".
Sleep well everyone
Glyn