Front page of the Daily Gazette's opinion section Sunday

“America is addicted to oil,” President Bush half stuttered during last year’s State of the Union address, admitting for the first time that America is overly dependent on fossil fuels.

For a man whose entire family dynasty is based on America’s addiction to oil, this was a fairly bold admission, but now that a year has passed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the president has yet to truly grasp the reality of our dire energy situation, especially as he sets delusional and potentially dangerous goals for alternative fuels.

America is surely addicted to oil, but more accurately put, we are addicted to overconsumption—a fact the Bush Administration, as well as most of Congress, refuses to recognize. Consequently, our leaders still believe they can find a new source for America’s ‘fix,’ mainly in the form of ethanol.

As President Bush announced during this year’s State of the Union address, he is aiming to reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years. Amazingly, his strategy is based on producing more energy, not consuming less.

To reach his stated goal, our president is aiming to produce 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017, most of which will come in the form of ethanol. While at first glance ethanol may seem like a miracle cure, a deeper look reveals that going from gasoline to ethanol is much like going from cocaine to heroin.

Instead of a road to recovery from our energy addiction, President Bush is offering a broad expansion of a policy that is already threatening the world’s food supply and in some regions, taking food from the poor.

Ethanol, which is derived from corn, is hardly an ‘alternative’ or ‘renewable’ resource, as it requires an inordinate amount of fossil fuel and fertile land to produce.

Nearly all the ingredients for making ethanol -- from fertilizers, to herbicides, to pesticides, to farm machinery, to transport trucks, to ethanol plants -- all require fossil fuels.

Some scientists even argue that the amount of fossil fuel energy needed to produce ethanol exceeds the amount of energy acquired from burning the ethanol. In other words, the entire ethanol production process is a counterproductive waste of time!

Even more noteworthy is the fact that ethanol production is taking over America’s vital farming resources—the best evidence yet indicating that automobiles, not human beings, are at the top of the food chain.

According to the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington DC-based environmental organization, ethanol distilleries in the U.S. are projected to consume 139 million tons of corn in 2008, requiring more than half of the projected harvest. Yes, more than half!

The price of corn has already risen to a ten-year high, threatening small farmers and sending a ripple effect throughout the food market that is set to soon raise the prices of meat, poultry, dairy, and other food products.

Corn supplies are expected to dwindle this year from nearly 2 billion bushels to only 752 million bushels, or the equivalent of just a three-week supply.

The effects have already been felt in Mexico, where the price of the tortilla has taken off, sparking political uprisings and leaving many of the country’s poor unable to maintain a standard diet.

Tragically, this appears to be just the beginning of a prolonged period of energy and food insecurity, as policy makers have yet to grasp the grim reality that the planet has been pushed beyond its environmental limitations.

As Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, points out, even if today's entire U.S. grain harvest were converted into fuel for cars, it would still satisfy less than one-sixth of U.S. demand. Nonetheless, with the support of the President and Congress, America’s farmland is being devoted to fueling cars instead of feeding people.

Many are betting on breakthroughs in ‘cellulosic ethanol’ technology to help alleviate the load, but the technology, which faces numerous obstacles, is far too underdeveloped to make a difference in the near future. There is little time to spare as analysts are predicting corn shortages as early as 2008.

“We are facing an epic competition,” Brown explains, “between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive.”

There is no alternative resource that will ever be able to match the efficiency and former abundance of fossil fuel, meaning any authentic solution to our energy addiction must be based primarily on reducing demand, not creating more fuel.

One thing is for certain: starving people to fuel cars is unacceptable.