It’s important in the spirit of intelligent, RFK-style communication to be capable of nuance and distinction in solving big problems. Energy shortages and global energy inflation, front and center.

If the present “green” movement were truly about arriving at a cleaner environment while improving and not impoverishing the global living standard and starving to death the population, solutions like methanol fuel production would already be online.

If ethanol producers were even the slightest bit bright and honestly dedicated to actually expanding the total fuel supply model instead of shrinking the food supply under government subsidy, there would be a methanol plant right alongside every ethanol plant in America.

With electro-cracked water to produce hydrogen (using electrolysis) and their abundance of CO2 byproduct, you could produce a never ending supply of methanol, a more powerful and practical source of combustion fuel that would turn America into the world leader in all source energy.

As we know, energy abundance is not the underlying objective.

As early as 2009, Dr. Robert Zubrin and I (Zubrin was advocating a manned mission to Mars 20-years before Elon Musk) tried to explain the vast superiority of methanol versus ethanol as part of an “all of the above” energy revolution in the United States that would instantly lower the price of every good and service in our economy and give us an irrepressible pathway to regaining our manufacturing sector with cheap energy (with sane tax policies) to bury the global competition.

Best of all, it doesn’t require us to attach the bread basket to the gas tank as ethanol does. Methanol would work fabulously in conjunction with our richly abundant fossil fuels to expand the overall supply base. We could easily return to the days of $1 gasoline with methanol as part of the fuels menu. The economy would skyrocket… groceries would be dirt cheap and we would be fully energy independent in perpetuity.

I even tried to lobby farm state politicians and the ethanol industry to embrace the obvious ethanol-methanol dual pathway to clean energy abundance that would both augment and coexist with fossil fuels in securing American energy security and independence forever. It quickly became obvious that their real social objectives were far different than a new golden age of abundance and prosperity.

The methanol fix is so simple it hurts.

Methanol can either be made from a small amount of hydrogen and CO2, or it can be easily made from the off-gassed methane loss from oil drilling, or it can even be refined from raw coal.

Methanol suffers none of the horsepower and lower mileage drawbacks of ethanol and doesn’t require or occupy food crop acreage to produce. It’s chemically superior to fuel ethanol in every way except incompatibility with aluminum pistons, which should be scrapped anyway in favor of more durable engine construction. Engines should be made from steel.

With hybrid vehicles that recharge themselves while driving… eliminating the need for toxic and hyper-expensive batteries for power storage and electrical grid recharging burden, we could stretch our vast oil, coal and natural gas supplies for a thousand years, giving plenty of time for mastery of fusion, zero-point and pure hydrogen power as the true future of endless and abundant energy.

Methanol easily helps build that bridge.

But as we know, current energy policy is NOT MEANT to build a better future. It’s meant to starve and depopulate and deindustrialize mankind for total control.