I agree... but you know what i mean.  Nuclear Energy as we see it now.  The Plants in Sim City that were way better then Coal but had the slight chance of blowing up and irradiating everything.

Cellulistic Ethanol seems like it'll be fairly big too considering the push for it by the Obama campaign as it's main choice for alternative energy.

Though i do much perfer the thought of charging my car much like I would my cellphone etc.

Guess that would screw up Gas Stations pretty bad though, what would happen to the things?  I mean almost any store could put in an external plug and charge people for a charge if they are running low far from home.

The problem with ethanol is the energy it needs to be produced, so in the end it's only the question about where to get to energy for ethanol production. The best way to produce ethanol, at the moment would be to farm seaweed, or what do you call the thing that forms into water with high nitrogen level during hot summerdays.

I just noticed, you can delete the quote boxes after they are empty.

Oh yeah... i'd say it's flawed.  But with all the government money the US is going to be putting into it... you can bet that the Democrats will have a lot of motivation to keep cars ethanol based.

Otherwise it could just be poked at as wasted spending.  Meanwhile at least some republicans no doubt will be lobbied by the oil companies to keep it as ethanol is in there best interests moving foward as once again... it's something they can control.  If it's not liquid based accessability is suddenly a lot easier and they have to adapt fast or die.

It's a problem... but whenever a company has a problem rather then let them adapt or die, we bail them out... or change the laws to there advantage.  Look at Piracy, Airlines, current bailout, car companies... etc.

We'd be better off supporting the working class workers of said companies, putting them to work elsewhere and letting the companies themselves die for refusing to adapt.

Now that would be awesome.

@Kasz: Actually Sweden plans to get rid of all oil in energy usage before 2020(?), this caused them to get rid of their non-nuclear principle and buy lots of ethanol from Brazil (which really is a pioneer in ethanol fuels). Of course, in Sweden, a lot of problems occurs due to cold weather during winter, since ethanol becomes a really bad fuel when there's cold.
Currently it looks like the best options for transport would be methane/natural gases to public transport inside cities, railroads electricity and diesel for everything else (including private peoples cars).

Probably, assuming you get the right engine for it, and not just a converter. (Which are available now for 2K or so which would greatly cut the gas bills, though i hear they make the car a bit explosive during accidents not having the needed shutoffs a regular engine would.)

However I still gotta ask why we couldn't just go full plug-in cars.

@Kasz: If you were meaning ethanol, normal otto engine works with a mix of ethanol and gasoline. For example in Sweden they use 85/15 mix. It ups the consumption a little, but it works basically normally.

The reason for not having plug-in cars, is the size, life, weight and cost of the batteries, making the car expensive and impractical. And charging also takes a lot of time (not to mention the oil industrys influence on car industry). Basically phase two hybrids would take us one step closer to plug-in cars, but hybrids are very expensive. Let's take a look on Toyota Prius, which costs about 1,7 times the price of Corolla, a car from which it's made from.

Of course there is Tesla Motors and a number of "homemade" tries, but nothing that would be a commercial success.

No i meant Natural Gases. You can get a converter to run your gas engine to natural gas and fill it up from a pump at your house. (If you've got natural gas.)

http://alternativefuels.about.com/od/naturalgaspropane/a/whatsnaturalgas.htm