What bothers me about Friedman's pronouncement is that it's, well, a pronouncement. Leave it to me, he seems to be saying, I've got it all figured out for us. Hardly. There are so many parts of the equation he is leaving out of the dynamics (as Robert and Dave start to plumb). He'd be doing us all a better service if  he was a little less certain and a little more transparent in his thought process so we could have some confidence that he's thought through water-use issues, petrochemicals, and the competition between stomachs and gas tanks. Certainty is a rare commodity these days. I'm only certain about one thing. If it sounds so simple, it's too good to be true. (My prayers are with those cellulosic conversion dudes.)

Robert, it's a short column, so I guess it's possible I'm reading too much into it.

But Friedman is nothing if not the repository of conventional wisdom. And there's a certain strain of conventional wisdom growing in D.C. right now that says:

Brazil has gained energy independence via ethanol.
Thus, ethanol rulez.

I see Friedman's column as an attempt to glom onto and burnish that basic notion.

But the notion is wrong. Brazil has copious sugarcane; we have copious corn. Brazil uses very little per-capita energy and has far fewer cars per capita. If we tried to match the percentages Brazil has achieved ... well, we couldn't. But in the attempt, we would utterly ravage our landscape with fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, completely destroy what's left of our water quality, and further cement the power, size, and control of agribiz giants.

We need to shift quickly to cellulosic ethanol (and, eventually, electricity) to fuel our cars, and more importantly, we need to use less energy. We need to drive less. That's what you never hear in these columns about Brazil, only the pleasing illusion that we can keep on keepin' on because, hey, look, Brazil did!

www.grist.org

I take your point about Friedmann and conventional wisdom in Washington, in gneral.  There's a "Gee whiz wow" flavor to this column that grates on me too.  But there's nothing to suggest that Friedman imagines that the US could produce enough ethanol to match the substitution percentage Brazil has achieved, or that ethanol would somehow allow us to "keep on keeping on" at our current unsustainably high levels of energy consumption.

Re-reading his column, I noticed that he does write in the last paragraph that shifting to more ethanol in fuel could "strengthen democrats in our hemisphere and weaken the petrocrats in the Middle East." Perhaps this could be construed as an implicit reference to energy independence, and one  that I missed in my first read through, but ...

I do agree with Friedman that more ethanol fuel pumps, making new cars flex-fuel capable and cutting the punitive import tariff would boost the ethanol industry, and that this in turn would focus more R&D dollars and attention on cellulosic conversion technology to make this happen sooner rather than later - something that you might also agree would be a good thing.

Robert Delfs