I was reading an article yesterday in the Evansville Courier & Press about a third ethanol plant that is going to open in southern Indiana. There are concerns, even from the mayor of Evansville, about how these new ethanol plants may compound the area's air pollution problem. There are some issues as to how the energy for the ethanol plants will be derived. As I wrote about previously, one plant wants to burn tires for energy. Although I really believe that ethanol can be a beneficial energy source in the future, it does raise the concern of how to power these plants without fossil fuels. How do we balance our desire to start perfecting alternative energy with our desire to continue using fossil fuels? How can we generate alternative energy with other alternative energy? If we can do the latter, how do we make it cost-effective and reliable to say, make ethanol using wind or solar power? Once we generate ethanol, are we going to use this first batch of ethanol to make more? Or are we going to sell all of the ethanol and use cheaper fossil fuels, such as coal, to produce the ethanol? When considering these questions, it does make me stop and think about how alternative energy development is a work in progress. Yet, my hope is that in creating a market for ethanol, we try to go about the process in the right way, meaning that we should use ethanol to try to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. If we simply rely on fossil fuels to generate ethanol and more ethanol plants keep popping up, it doesn't seem that we are getting away from the fossil fuel reliance. We might have cleaner burning cars but in the end, we'll have more and more coal-fired power plants to create electricity and to power our ethanol plants. We might also be burning more and more tires to produce ethanol. So, in effect, we are cleaning up the air when we drive our cars and when the tires wear out on these cars, we simply burn them to make the fuel. The air pollution gain from the ethanol seems to be lost with the ultimate burning of the used tires.