Picture this: Blue skies, fresh air, green trees and a smile on your face as you get into your new 2011 hybrid Ford Explorer. This car is great. It looks nice, it's made in the U.S. (well, most of it is …), it's reasonably large so you can drive all your friends around and pack for long road trips, and it gets a fantastic 30 MPG. Here's the best part though, by buying and driving this car, you're decreasing U.S. dependence on outside energy sources. That's right, it runs on corn ethanol-based fuel. In fact, just about everyone you know goes everywhere in a shiny, eco-friendly, no-longer-gas-but-ethanol-guzzling automobile. Now you and the rest of America can peacefully drive to the mall, the grocery store, school, work, the city, the country and back home again in cars that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (by, at best, 12 percent) and sustain American independence and superiority!

It almost sounds too good to be true, right? We can stop using the finite resource of oil at an obscene rate, cut down on greenhouse gases and continue living our energy-inefficient lives, but this time without guilt. John Barbieri's Oct. 4 article, "Ethanol fuel for cars, derived from corn-everyone wins," happily reported the advantages of making a large-scale switch to ethanol fuel in the U.S. Referencing Brazil's apparently successful move to ethanol, he suggests that if we in the U.S. worked toward the same goal, the above scenario might come to pass. As anyone else concerned for our environment and future would be, he's well aware of the sticky situation that our addiction to oil will soon (if it hasn't already) become. What's better is that he has a tangible, hopeful solution to the problem of dependence on a finite resource: corn ethanol.

It broke my heart to read. The fact is that corn ethanol can never replace gasoline in this country, not by a long shot. If done right, it might be a good way to help lower our rapidly growing rate of oil consumption, but nothing more than that. Why? Because we use too much energy in the U.S. to even consider replacing oil with corn (or wheat or soy …) ethanol.

First, let's see how much ethanol it would take to become oil independent like Brazil. There, they use 4.2 barrels of oil per person per year. While here, we use 27 barrels of oil per person per year. That's 6.4 times more. We do produce 11 barrels of oil per person, though, whereas Brazil has 3.35 barrels per person to work with. Brazil has to make up for .85 barrels per person, which they do with sugar cane ethanol. The U.S., on the other hand, has to close a gap of 16 barrels of oil per person per year (i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/06/lessons-from-brazil.html). It should also be noted that the U.S. population is about 110 million people greater than Brazil's (CIA World Factbook).

But can we produce enough ethanol to close this gap and become energy independent? After all, like Barbieri said, we make a lot of corn (25 percent of the world's supply). That's about 13 billion bushels of corn (www.theoildrum.com). In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan tells us that 80 percent of the American diet comes from corn. It's in almost everything-soda, candy, snack foods, livestock feed, you name it. According to the July 18 University of Minnesota News article "Ethanol fuel presents a corn-undrum," 14.3 percent of U.S. corn is already converted to ethanol fuel. That replaces a sorry 1.72 percent of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline we use in a year. If we drastically changed our diets (as we'd need to) and used all of our corn as fuel, it would still only account for 12 percent of our oil needs. Considering that the U.S. imports nearly 60 percent of its oil from other places, that's a far cry from independence.

Unfortunately, we're not considering the production cost of all that corn either. In order to produce corn, we use huge amounts of fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) to fertilize, to plow, to keep pests off of the crops and to irrigate. So producing more corn would require more of these things. Also, large-scale agriculture of that kind tends to promote deforestation, ground pollution and soil erosion, all contributing to the kind of harm we're trying to avoid by using less oil.

Ethanol, though, can help. For many of the reasons mentioned by Barbieri, using a greater amount of ethanol in our gasoline is not only easy to do, but could help jump-start domestic agriculture, which would be positive. It's also a stepping stone toward better energy alternatives, like he said. But, the real key is to revisit the example of Brazil.

Maybe, instead of focusing on the fact that they use ethanol more commonly than we do, we should note that we use 6.4 times more oil than they do. In order to stop being reliant on a foreign source of energy to run our economy, maybe we need to use less of that energy, period. Maybe the hybrid ethanol-powered SUV isn't the answer: Ditching the SUV might be a more reasonable idea. After all, it's much easier for the general population to lower consumption little by little than it is for our government, farmers and scientists to work on new technologies for oil emancipation.

Paz is a junior majoring in religion. He enjoys long bus rides and other modes of mass transit and despises the wasteful inefficiency of suburban sprawl.