[Renegade 13]

Best way to go (in my opinion) is to totally skip ethanol, which is utterly impractical, and go straight to hydrogen. If governments around the world pumped a few billion into developing hydrogen powered vehicles that were practical for everyday use, I bet we'd be driving them around in 5 years. Of course, you still need all the new infrastructure to support a hydrogen-based transportation system, and safeguards to make sure that everything doesn't go BOOM! every time there's a car crash, levelling the block! But hydrogen is practical, since hydrogen can be produced from 'clean' renewable energy sources (geothermal, tidal, hydroelectic, nuclear, etc) and would serve as the perfect fuel for vehicles.

The problem is, everyone is obsessed with ethanol at the moment which, if what I once read is correct, would supply only 1/3 of the US demand for fuel even if the entire arable land area of the US was given over to ethanol production. Also ethanol is having a very detrimental effect on agriculture. How you ask? Since more and more of the US corn production is given over to ethanol production, that corn isn't available to feed cattle, pigs, etc, thus making the price of producing cattle, pigs and all that go way up due to the shortage.