If there's one thing I learned in Latin America these past few weeks, it's how woefully far behind the United States has fallen in its Monrovian position of most valuable player and protector of the Western Hemisphere.

If the treasure of the 1800s was land, we got it. We got most of the country from the French for three pennies per acre. Other brokered and battled cessions from Mexico and Britain shaped the country further, and as a popular movement, Manifest Destiny meant just getting to the Pacific, or as far as you could make it without dying of dysentery.

If the treasure of the 1900s was fuel, we got that, too. As we rode the rails and loaded up freighters with mercantile goods along the British model, we besmirched the air with coal-fired fumes just like our English-speaking comrades.

The treasure of the 2000s, though, is something less tangible. You can't drop it on your foot, and you can't hammer a flag into the ground to say, "This here's mine!"

"Efficiency, ho!" is the new rallying cry, and you are more likely to hear the clarion call in German, Chinese or Spanish than in English (especially not with a Texan twang).

So during the Biofuels Americas conference, I yawned at the TBA torpor of the Department of Energy representative a.k.a. administration cheerleader.

 

Even in the speaker schedule I was given at the outset of the conference, this speaker's topic had yet to be decided. Visual aids? Not so much as a construction-paper cutout of a cornstalk.

His message was as fickle as Washington energy policy, and just as disappointing.

"My president is committed to the development of crop-based fuel throughout the Americas," the man in the suit said, reading word-for-word from his papers on the lectern.

"That is why he has partnered with Brazilian President Lula da Silva in the drive to make ethanol the fuel of the 21^st century!"

Rah-Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah . . . Humbug!

What this shill didn't want to admit is that we are the rookies in this new biofuel dream team. The Brazilians, often poor in monetary terms, were rich in wisdom after the fuel shocks of the 1970s. In the 1980s, the federal government in Brasilia gave the domestic sugar-based ethanol industry a shot in the arm.

The government juiced up its biofuel sector using--get this--the national oil company, Petrobras. By 1979, Brazil had its first car operating on 100% ethanol. It was a dinky little Fiat, not a Hummer by any means, but it could run no matter what crazy business transpired in the Middle East or Venezuela.

So why in the name of George Washington did the United States continue to build boat-sized gas guzzlers, even while Japanese companies proved how much American consumers craved fuel economy?

The answer is political industry.

While working on Capitol Hill a few years back, I witnessed a parade of agricultural lobbying groups coming through the doors to press on behalf of their own crop cadres and beef bureaus. I worked for a Kansas congressman, after all.

In those heady days, when gasoline had yet to break $2 a gallon, we had a few ethanol-themed bumper stickers out in the reception area for visitors to take home.

I bet there are more now.

But do those visitors know what the lobbyists won't tell them? Do they know that it takes twice the amount of farmland to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn as it does to produce the same amount from sugar cane?

Do they care?

Better Questions, Better Answers

DaimlerChrysler executive Tom LaSorda told Bush in a hob-nob last week that he thinks ethanol is "the answer for America to lower our dependence on foreign oil."

No, it's not. In fact, there is no one answer.

And developing ethanol is worth little energy investment if we do not first promote energy conservation. There is an order of operations in fuel production, just as in mathematics, and your numbers just won't come out right if the proper steps are not taken in the proper order.

We need to drive less. We need to test different crops and shut out the crop lobbyists just as much as we need to shut out the oil lobbyists. They are poisoning us.

What is needed is an honest look at the resources available on a local scale, with each part of the United States and each part of the world doing its own calculus based on logistics and logic.

If the best "renewable" fuel we can think of costs more oil and water to produce than oil itself would cost, we should think again.

If the same people who have trapped us in the game of geopolitical gridlock that we find ourselves in today are now pitching the power points of petroleum-based fuel production, we should think again.

And, for once, we should think first before letting the market think for us.

Regards,

Sam Hopkins