Contenders for King Ethanol
Man, sorry for the delay in posting - we’ve been lapsing in and out of food comas since Thursday afternoon, as is customary over Thanksgiving. But now that we’re back, we’re proud to announce that we now know who rounds out the top ten ethanol producing countries. The first two are the US and Brazil, so now we’re going to list off the remaining seven, including what crop they process into ethanol and a few tips for how they could become #1 someday.
3. China (corn). China’s population is both large in number and highly industrious, so it’s surprising that they came up short behind Americans, who are eternally distracted by television, and Brazilians, who are eternally distracted by each other; none of them seem to wear any clothes larger than a bikini for anything except maybe state funerals. But on the other hand, the Chinese only now getting cars on the road en masse, so the lag is understandable. And given recent quality control issues they’ve had, we’ll be happy if they manage to produce ethanol without toxic amounts of lead in it.
4. India (sugarcane). India is another populous, industrious country who should be higher on the list, but they have some of the same issues China does, plus much of their time is spent being yelled at by frustrated Americans calling customer service. Perhaps they should take a page from the West’s playbook and outsource their nightmarish phone bank jobs to an even poorer, less developed country (Myanmar, perhaps?), which would free them up enough to crank out more ethanol.
5. France (sugar beets). France found the perfect, and perhaps only, use for beets, since they’re too disgusting to eat. But they’re still lower than they should be. History suggests surrendering their processing facilities to Germany.
6. Germany (rye). Hey, speak of the devil. The Germans need to find a stock that doesn’t compete with their world-renowned breweries if they want to compete with everyone above them. We’d recommend using waste beer, but we’re pretty sure that doesn’t exist in Germany. Those people will drink anything.
7. Russia (wheat). The assertion that ethanol processing wastes otherwise edible crops might be bunk everywhere else on Earth, but Russia is usually in dire enough straits to run counter to that line of reasoning. Luckily, they have an inexhaustible natural resource - sorrow - that they’ve been exporting across the globe for decades now. If they can somehow distill tears into workable fuel, they’ll be at the top of this list by Valentine’s Day.
8. Canada (corn/wheat). Canada has some pretty sweet oil fields that are still lucrative enough for them to downplay alternative fuel sources. But that won’t last forever, and they’ll probably go through the same stupid alarmism over food prices and crop waste that we had. But with a good portion of their country being a frozen hinterland, they don’t have the same capacity for cellulosic ethanol that we do. Unless they use snow, in which case they’ll kick our Yankee asses.
9. Spain (wheat). Spain’s priorities are tuned more to the electric car - they plan to have a million of them on the road by 2014. That’s probably for the best; their cars can charge in the afternoon while they’re asleep, the lucky bastards.
10. South Africa (??). No one knows what South Africa turns into ethanol. We’re guessing it’s corpses. If so, then stay the course - that’s not a bad allocation of resources for them.
We’ve said it before, but it’s still true that when people think of electric cars, they picture - with no offense intended to electric car hobbyists - hopeless tragedies like the dorkmobile to the right of this sentence. But the basic idea of a plug-in electric vehicle still has some promise;