When Colorado's new governor Bill Ritter and his fellow democrats in the Colorado state legislature entered office last month, they promised a bold new energy plan for the state. Among the ideas under consideration is a bill to required Colorado's utilities to generate 20% of their power using renewable resources. While the state legislature continues to consider these more extensive plans, the governor's office has moved forward with a bold new plan to change Colorado's energy landscape.

Or at least that's what we all wish had happened.

Instead, as reported in the Denver Post, events have been a bit less Earth-shattering.

Colorado motorists will see 45 new E85 ethanol-fueling locations by the end of the year, more than tripling the number of stations in the state.

Gov. Bill Ritter and General Motors officials on Thursday announced the expansion - up from the state's current 13 E85 fueling stations - as part of Ritter's drive to a "new energy economy" centered on renewable energy.

E85 is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. Most of the nation's ethanol supply comes from corn.

Ethanol fuels are suitable for cars and trucks designated "flexible fuel," meaning the vehicles can use any combination of gasoline and ethanol.

Ritter said greater use of E85 will help reduce petroleum imports, produce fewer particulate emissions, benefit corn growers and stimulate economic development through new ethanol-manufacturing plants.

"We're not doing this just to be doing it or even just for the economic development," Ritter said. "It's important for the environment."

Unfortunately, there's probably currently more truth to the first part of Ritter's statement than the second.

Since E85 is made from a mixture of 85% ethanol (mostly produced using corn) and 15% gasoline, it might be reasonable to expect that it contributes somewhere around 85% less CO₂ emissions than regular gasoline. After all, the corn used to make the ethanol pulled all of its carbon out of the atmosphere, so using it to power our cars should ideally leave us with no net gain in atmospheric CO₂. But the pictures not quite that rosy.

Using more recent state of the art (circa 2005) the energy usage figures improve slightly, with an appreciable decrease in GHG [green house gas] emissions. Dry mill current technology reduces petroleum usage by 75.6%, GHG emissions by 25.5% and fossil energy use by 40.7%. Wet mill current technology reduces petroleum usage by 73.7%, GHG by 23.8% and fossil energy by 42.5%.

So in the end E85 is only cutting CO₂ emissions by about a quarter, much less than might be suspected. And as this somewhat short-tempered columnist notes,

[i]n October, Consumer Reports reported that government "support for flexible-fuel vehicles, which can run on E85, is indirectly causing more gasoline consumption rather than less" (aggravated emphasis mine).

Worse, many critics also question whether ethanol is, in fact, any healthier for the environment than gas.

Last year the journal Science reported that numerous studies illustrated that corn ethanol technologies produced "greenhouse gas emissions similar to those of gasoline."

Experts say that anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent of ethanol is "renewable energy," and the rest of ethanol's energy - applied to produce corn and process the corn into ethanol - is derived from coal, natural gas and nuclear power.

So why would President Bush tout ethanol in his State of the Union speech? Why would Ritter be teaming up with GM to sell us on this alternative energy when many unanswered questions remain?

It's about public policy that sounds good to the ear of the average American.

As for GM, it's about the bottom line.

According to news reports, the struggling company plans to double production of flexible-fuel vehicles to 2 million by 2010. Consumer Reports claims that "the FFV surge is being motivated by generous fuel-economy credits that auto-makers get for every FFV they build, even if it never runs on E85."

So this is really good for General Motors - but not so much for Coloradans.

As if to underscore this last point, the Rocky Mountain News reports that

GM has more than 2 million E85 FlexFuel vehicles and is offering 16 E85 ethanol-capable vehicle models this year, with an annual production of more than 400,000 vehicles.

"At GM, we believe that the biofuel with the greatest potential to displace petroleum-based fuels in the U.S. is ethanol," said Alan Weverstad, executive director of GM's environment and energy public policy center. "And we have made a major commitment to vehicles that can run on E85 ethanol."

As part of the celebrations, GM on Thursday afternoon funded discounted E-85 for two hours, selling it for 85 cents a gallon at the Sinclair station on 6301 W. 58th Ave. in Arvada.

So, is this purely a case of GM's greening mantle being no more substantial than the emperor's new clothes?

Perhaps, but as always things are seldom so simple. Despite E85's shortcomings, Colorado's move does represent an important step towards reframing our transportation needs in terms of sustainable development rather than myopic short-term economics. Just because the process of turning corn into ethanol is currently fossil-fuel intensive doesn't mean that it must be so; in fact, the increasing use of wind, solar, and other renewable energy source as part of our power grid will have the effect of lowering the amount of fossil fuels used to produce ethanol by greening the energy used to process the corn itself. And corn is also not the only potential source of ethanol - any sugar- or starch-rich material can be used towards that end. Using agricultural and industrial waste to produce ethanol is an area of intense interest (for example, Coors Brewery, located in Golden, Colorado, produces ethanol using its brewing wastes), and moving towards an ethanol-based fuel economy will undoubtedly help spur investment in these technologies by providing a much larger market for than currently exists.

So while GM and Governor Ritter's motivations may be somewhat suspect, the plan itself shouldn't be disregarded out of hand. At the moment it's probably best to view ethanol-based fuels like E85 through the same lens as biodiesel - not as a solution in and of itself, but as an important way to help bridge the gap between today's brown economy and a bright green future. It's important to remember that as being green becomes more of a political - and public relations - necessity, we must come to view announcements such as this in a more skeptical manner. But in doing so we also need to be careful not to dismiss every such plan out of hand.

The current focus on ethanol-based fuels may not be as big a step forward as it could be, but at least it is a step in the right direction. The trick now is to keep moving... After all, it's often surprising how far you can go by simply taking one small step at a time.

(Photograph by Matthew Staver of the Denver Post.)