DISQUS

"They have cars run by sugar, but somehow, our scientists can't do the same for us with sugar and/or ethanol?"


No, because Brazil's in the tropics and we're not. Ethanol=Alcohol. As in booze. Generally they add stuff to it that makes it un-drinkable (like, say, gasoline; in the US ethanol is mixed with gas, not put into engines just by itself.) They make it from sugar down there, just like they make rum; we make it from corn up here, just like we make whiskey. But you can grow sugar all year round in a tropical climate --- stuff's practically a weed --- you can only grow and harvest corn a few months out of the year, up here. Furthermore, sugar doesn't require as much fertilizer, and sugar plantation rely on more cheap human labor as opposed to big tractors and combines our Midwest farmers use. So since you need natural gas to make fertilizer, and gasoline to run tractors, you're putting a lot of energy into growing ethanol from corn. Further, the best brazillian ehtanol plants use the dried, juiced cane scraps to fuel the boilers for the distilleries; most ethnaol plants up here use natural gas boilers. (The waste product from the corn goes into animal feed.)



But really your biggest problem is that even if we devoted the whole US corn crop to ethanol --- no more tortillas, goodbye corn-flakes, hello $$$-free range chicken and beef --- you would only replace about 15% of the US gasoline consumption.



They're trying to come up with a way to make cheep wood alcohol (that's the stuff that makes you blind if you drink it) out of woody-stemmed weeds and so forth (called cellulosic ethanol, after the cellulose fibers that makes plants woody). Idea being that you could grow a ton of it without using up any crop land. But they're not there yet, and you'd still have to put in a lot of energy harvesting it an distilling it.



P.S. Brazillian ethanol production is destroying the shit out of the rain forest.



P.P.S. Glad I could cheer you up. :)