AUGUST 7, 2026 ENVIRONMENT How we can all stop buying gas The price of gas is projected to rise over $10 a gallon by the end of the decade. How do we escape ever-rising gas prices? I think a lot of people can agree the world would be a better place if we get away from fossil fuels. I think I have a roadmap for the next 20 years to escape fossil fuel by 80+% – ending wars, stopping people from suffering from climate change. I’m talking about building smarter, more efficient communities increasing people’s overall welfare and happiness and the global gross domestic product. The first step is, of course, building smaller, more walkable communities, everything within a bicycle ride or a bus ride, connecting every city or community together with at least one bus. Buses are important because they are community spaces on wheels, where community can sit together and interact instead of just commuting. In the old days most people didn’t go more than ten miles from where they lived. And everything was made locally and everybody was self-sufficient. Local production is the heart of sustainability, producing the products where they are consumed. Second, electric transportation is one of the biggest ideas on how to get away from big oil. The biggest problem is batteries because they take a lot of resources, money and time to refine. They are so expensive they are only going to be able to build about 20% of our cars with them, even in the next 20 years. Some electric vehicles like trains or trolleys were part of every city years ago, and they ran directly off the grid without batteries. There was a big scandal when they got rid of these electric forms of transportation during the 1920s when they were torn down to make room for more roads and to sell ERICK BROWN Groundcover vendor No. 617 gasoline and tires. They are the best, most efficient public transportation, and cities are working to install them; but the cost is too much for a lot of cities to re-install them without more demand for public transport. Small electric vehicles like electric bicycles, scooters, e-mobility devices or even golf carts are great small-footprint vehicles that don't need a lot of batteries. They could be built quickly and could be used to do errands and to commute to work if cities were set up better. They only cost pennies to recharge. A solution to the battery problem is ride-share. A single Autonomous Vehicle could be a robotaxi, with a single vehicle serving 20 or more people a day instead of just one person.This is more like a pay-by-mile subscription, where you don't own the vehicle. And the owner of the vehicle can be an operator, which might give owners of vehicles a revenue stream. But they will have to pay a subscription to use the software and also pay for charging costs. The monopoly of the charging network and energy infrastructure is a big problem with future electric vehicle use. The third step is offering better alternative fuel technology in cars. Alternatives already exist. Flex-fuel vehicles use E85 fuel without a problem and just give consumers a choice on what type of fuel they want to run. Natural gas fuel vehicles are a possibility, either alone or in combination with gasoline or ethanol. Car manufacturers should make every new car either a flex-fuel and/or hybrid fuel. Most common vehicles using E85 use 30% more fuel, but increase performance by over 20%, so the real MPG difference is less than 10%. People can get even higher MPG using ethanol in combination with turbochargers, which allow you to get more horsepower out of a smaller engine. This year I have experienced over $2500 in savings alone, in the cost of my vehicle driving over 40,000 miles, and saving over a dollar a gallon by using E85; getting 16 MPG compared to five if I ran on gasoline. I completely offset the cost of a new vehicle in less than one year. You might be able to reprogram your car to run higher blends of ethanol like E85 with a simple programming or conversion kit that costs only a few hundred dollars to install. Airplanes using biofuels are more efficient than jet fuel because of the oxygen added into the fuel. Rocket ships taking us to space run on methane gas. The fourth step is making more biofuels, of course. The more that we produce biofuel, the less gasoline we need to consume. We can produce 80% of our fuel needs with biofuels. Right now, U.S. ethanol production is meant to address high gas prices due to international demand. We are producing ethanol for the international market. We are only producing about 11% of our fuel needs through biofuel, mainly because we have a 10% mandate by Federal law. But every car after 2001 can handle higher ethanol blends like E15 or E30 or even E50 without a problem. Mini vehicles can run on E85 without a problem even if they are not a flex fuel vehicle. There are many countries around the world that use E85 as their primary fuel, such as Brazil, and the United States could be one of them. But economic and political factors and our addiction to fossil fuel have so far prevented that. Every gallon of ethanol that we run means one less gallon of gas, and every new car should be a flex-fuel vehicle. But we are not growing corn to make By combining twin-turbochargers, high-pressure injection and high-octane ethanol, this Chevrolet engine maximizes thermal efficiency and power density, proving how forced induction and alternative high-octane fuels let engines punch far above their weight. Photo taken by Erick Brown at the General Motors plant. ethanol. 70% of the corn we grow is to feed livestock. A byproduct of making ethanol is leftover distiller grains that can be used to feed livestock. As we grow corn, it is sent to a refinery to make different products using the GROUNDCOVER NEWS 13 Marathon gas station in Allen Park on March 15 shows the drastic price difference between E85, regular and diesel fuel. same cob of corn. By increasing the productivity of such corn, we would be able to do more than one thing, which makes the corn more profitable and usable. Distiller grain is healthier for the cows than row corn and better for the cow’s digestive system, so the byproducts of making ethanol are a better product. The amount of cattle that we have in the United States means that we have a lot of extra fuel stock available to make fuel right now. We can make 20-30% of our fuel just using feed stock alone, so we can triple the amount of fuel we can produce overnight. Other advanced ethanol manufacturing technology could be used, including enzymes or gasification on the corn stalks and other farm waste products, adding another 20-30% of fuel supply. We can take all yard waste and convert it into ethanol, and even some trash is producing ethanol in the communities that need it. How much will fuel cost if we produce it ourselves out of the trash? If we're the ones who produce it from garbage, neighborhoods or cities could work together with co-ops with syngas gasification systems or digestive enzymes reactors. Producing the fuel in the community where it’s consumed makes more self-sufficient communities. That alone could replace almost half of our fuel demand. Not to mention that all the methane gas produced from cattle farms and garbage facilities could be harnessed for fuel. It’s definitely possible to replace 80% of our fossil fuel consumption in the next 20 years if we start working towards these strategies now. If you can, help spread the word, … My name is Erick The Dreamgiver and I have a YouTube channel. I just hit 20,000 subscribers. I'm going to be making more videos about these topics and others!
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