There's nothing really wrong with the basic biofuel concept, but it sure has been implemented badly, or at least without much foresight.
While I'm not rabid tree-hugger (come see my NUKE THE WHALES bumpersticker), we are indeed living in a fool's paradise. The law of supply and demand is unlikely to be repealed anytime soon, so gas is not going to get cheaper. Given the rise of third-world markets, it is going to get much more expensive.
Ideally, we need to come up with a transportation system sufficiently flexible to meet the need, cheap enough that people will buy it and (to make sure it gets past the neo-luddites) doesn't have any effect on climate. It would also be a nice bonus if we could make it happen without being dependent on somebody else for our fuel supply. Gas won't do that, nor will biofuels. Electrical cars do not yet have the range or speed and too many people overlook that that electricity has to come from somewhere with its own set of ecochallenges. Hydrogen looks good (there's an elegant simplicity to 2H2 + O2 à 2H2O) but I was reading an article last week where somebody was seriously claiming that large-scale use of hyrdrogen as a fuel would cause a water shortage (Shake yer head, junior. Hear anythin?), which sort of illustrates the hurdles even good technology faces. Moreover, the refining and infrastructure problems are enormous.
(Somebody once asked the obvious question about automobiles. Let's pretend that it's a new invention and the inventor is trying to make the pitch for it to be adopted. "Well, in return for your accepting 100,000 deaths a year from collisions and untold numbers more from respiratory disease, turning thousands of square miles of productive famrland into paved desert and skewing our economy in favour of people who really don't like us, you'll get individual convenience." Like that would sell.
Solution? Damfino, but blind optimism is not a viable strategy.
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