Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast, this is Anastasia Glova, your host. Today is Tuesday, March 27th.

President Bush met with Detroit automakers yesterday, praising them for promoting alternatives to gasoline that would make the U.S. less dependent on foreign

oil. Chief executives from General Motors Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and Daimler Chrysler

have pledged to make half of their new vehicles flex fuel capable by 2012.

Congress appears likely to pass legislation to boost ethanol production,

but many observers, including some environmental groups, question whether ethanol is truly

a panacea against foreign dependence and environmental degradation.

Cato Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor is among the skeptics.

So we've had Flex Fuel vehicles since 1980 and they still remain a marginal presence on the

auto market.

Why is that?

Well let's put this in perspective.

There are 238 million cars on the road today

more or less. Only about 5 million of them are flex-fueled. So a very tiny part of the U.S.

Auto fleet is flexible fuel. It doesn't really cost that much more to get a

flexible fuel vehicle only a couple hundred dollars more and in fact they're

available and if you go to a GM's car lot you can buy flex fuel vehicles.

They'll sell you a couple of sedans, the Monte Carlo, and the Impala are flex fuel, lots of

SUVs and pickup trucks. But the reason they don't sell very well isn't because they're more

expensive, because they're really not that the country there are about 169,000 of those service stations that sell gasoline

only about 850 of them sell E85 so you go out and buy a Flex Field vehicle you're

not going to have any ethanol to put in it and then let's assume that you do want to put ethanol in your

...