Whether they know it or not, all of these politicians are calling for the government to prop up what is a particularly byzantine and wasteful form of … solar energy. You can’t grow corn without photosynthesis, which converts energy from sunlight into plant tissue. But to liberate this embedded sun power, ethanol-bound corn must be pulverized, inundated with water, fermented, and distilled into alcohol, which can then be mixed with gasoline and burned to power engines. And that’s after the corn is planted, doused with fossil fuel–derived fertilizers, shielded from weeds and insects with toxic chemicals, and harvested.
There’s a more straightforward way to leverage the sun, one that could generate much more energy with a fraction of the fuss: the photovoltaic solar panel, which directly converts sunshine into electricity that can be fed into power grids that, in turn, charge up electric vehicles, which use energy far more efficiently than do internal combustion engines. (Conventional cars convert just 20 percent of the fuel they burn to locomotion, versus nearly 90 percent for E.V.s).
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