DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC: You must to swallow the current phlogiston on biofuels

Americans currently find reality unpalatable. This manifests in many areas but is most noticeable in the rhetoric surrounding high gas prices and what the nation needs to do about them. Taking a cold shower and realizing a two hour commute to work in southern California just ain't right is news too tough for many to handle. So we put it on our credit cards and allow leaders and businessmen to blow smoke up our blowholes on how we'll achieve energy independence through new technologies.

A rich variety of schemes have been put forward delivered with the traditional slogan that occurs to every editorial writer who believes children's fairy tales about American ingenuity and exceptionalism.

There must be a new Manhattan Project!

A sampling, identities omitted because although geographically separated, they're alike in groupthink: "The United States needs to organize a Manhattan Project for alternative energy... [We] need a Manhattan Project for renewable energy ... [Let's] put some real money to work and get another 'Manhattan Project' up and running, this time for a simple solution to the energy crisis."

But the best laff-riots in the current crop of energy-independence suggestions come from the biofuel sector, an industry prone to desperate exaggerations now that corn-to-ethanol has acquired a coat of tarnish. For the moment we'll pass over offshore drilling and the phenomenon of hydrogen car leases for Hollywood celebrities.

Read the entirety of your host's analysis at the Reg here.