Independence way: John Kerry thinks we can innovate our way to energy security. We're closer than he knows.

• Author: Jaffe, Sam
• Position: Politics

If there's one topic on which Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry seems to have the vision thing, it's his goal of freeing America from her dependence on foreign oil. Last month, while delivering the weekly Democratic radio address, Kerry placed this issue to the center of his agenda. "Soaring energy prices are putting our economy at risk," he argued, and "our dependence on Middle East oil is putting our national security at risk."

Unfortunately, Kerry's solution has not quite been quite as forward-thinking as his rhetoric. He wants to provide $10 billion worth of incentives to the U.S. auto industry to encourage automakers to step up their production of advanced vehicles, ignoring the fact that Detroit has been getting similar subsidies for a decade, to little effect. And while Kerry is on the right track when he argues that the only long-term solution to our dependence on imported oil is "inventing our way out of it," his plan to move America to a hydrogen economy by 2020 doesn't go much beyond President Bush's plan for funding more research on hydrogen-powered vehicles. According to an MIT study published last year, even aggressive research is unlikely to put a viable hydrogen car on the road during the next two decades--and wouldn't even necessarily produce less carbon than today's hybrid automobiles.

But there's a way Kerry's plans--or Bush's--can live up to the rhetoric. During the past year, a pair of new technologies has emerged that, if properly nurtured, could provide the key to a broader effort to wean Americans off foreign oil, drastically reduce pollution, and help slow global warming. The first is an industrial process that may make ethanol far cheaper to produce than ever before, with the potential of making this much-maligned--and over-subsidized--biofuel economically competitive with gasoline. The second is a small, inexpensive piece of hardware that could make ethanol the basis for radically transforming our transportation infrastructure. Making these technologies yield a new product at the pump won't be easy. But they're far more promising than much of the research on which we're currently spending federal dollars and intellectual energy.

Bad gas

As far as the science books are concerned, ethanol is merely a form of alcohol, commonly produced from corn, that is mixed in with gasoline to provide transportation power. In Washington, however, the word "ethanol" immediately calls to mind billions of dollars in wasteful government subsidies and sycophantic paeans to imaginary family farmers. And for good reason. Beginning in the late 1970s, the federal government granted a tax credit at the pump for ethanol-compounded gasoline, plus an income tax credit for small ethanol producers--policies that have cost the taxpayer more than $7 billion in revenue over the last two decades, without much payoff (except to agribusiness). The ethanol industry produced 2.8 billion gallons last year, less than 3 percent of the volume of gasoline consumed by Americans. As a result, only a small fraction of gas stations actually sell ethanol-gasohol mixtures. To provide enough grain based ethanol to power the economy, notes Cornell agricultural economist David Pimentel, we'd have to use almost all of the farmland in the country just to grow the raw materials.

Worse, making ethanol is a hideous waste of energy. Traditional ethanol is made from fruit, primarily corn kernels, while the rest of the plant is either burned or plowed back into the soil. After its arrival at the ethanol refinery, the corn is mashed, producing a gooey soup. Then it is placed hi high temperature fermenters that break down the corn sugar into ethanol and water; a series of boiling and condensing processes squeezes out most of the water, leaving fuel-grade ethanol, which is essentially 199-proof...