Ethanol, the characteristic solvent for social distance and shellac, is also a motor fuel with attractive characteristics: it's made of sunshine and exactly the CO2 we like to take out of the atmosphere, it increases gasoline octane as an additive, it's environmentally quite benign in spills and such, and it's not imported from places with fractious and prickly governments. However, it doesn't just dribble out of corn plants: to get ethanol requires growing plants (fertilizer, tractor fuel...), hauling corn to a distillery, smooshing it up with yeast and keeping it warm (more fuel), distilling the alcohol out of the mush...