Letter: It’s time to embrace renewable energy

Friday, May 5, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

I suggest that it is time for our government to mandate requiring all gasoline to contain 25 percent alcohol. We need to embrace renewable energy with a vengeance.

We can cultivate ethanol from corn, barley and other crops. The production of these crops with alcohol will create much needed jobs in the countryside, would help improve air quality and stop our reliance on Arab oil.

Investors could build distilleries to convert the crops to ethanol. This is free enterprise. Now, ethanol's main use is as a gasoline oxygenate to boost air quality rather than as a serious replacement for foreign oil.

Farm Belt legislators must push Congress to mandate greater use of domestic corn-based ethanol in the U.S. fuel supply to reduce oil consumption.

Brazil is an example of what might have been if the United States had seriously committed itself 30 years ago to renewable energy. It's time to take some action - now!

Micki Jay, Las Vegas

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