Americans love alternatives.

Americans, in fact, DEMAND alternatives.

And the American economy has, since the days of the Industrial Revolution, provided unending varieties, and varieties within varieties, of products, designed to appeal to the American consumer in ever-changing ways.

The glaring exception to this trend is in development of alternative energies. The American automobile culture, since the passing of the Stanley Steamer, has depended on the easiest, cheapest form of energy–fossil fuels.

The system has worked surpassingly well for some one hundred years, but, as the twenty-first century dawned, so did a growing awareness that the world’s fossil fuel reserves are a finite resource faced with an apparently infinite demand.

That awareness might be expected to result in alternative-addicted Americans demanding the development of alternative energy, and marketers leaping at the chance to provide it.

The reality of alternative energies, however, is another story.

Ethanol, the alternative energy source most familiar to Americans, is actually an “energy negative”, requiring more energy, in the form of the natural-gas based fertilizer, and gasoline used by farmers when planting and shipping the corn from which the ethanol is extracted, than the ethanol provides.

Other alternative energies under development–hydroelectric, wind, solar, wave, and tidal powers, if perfected, may relieve some of the demand for fossil-fuel based electricity, but will never fuel the world’s transportation.

Hydrogen vehicles? Hydrogen must be produced from some other source–water, or, again, fossil fuels–and current conversion methods result in a net loss of energy. The demand for them as alternative energies? As of 2006, there were five hundred such vehicles in the world.

The fuel cells being developed for use in transportation, running on hydrogen, are not alternative energy themselves. Converting the hydrogen to electricity which powers an electric motor, they are expensive, fragile, and function poorly in low temperatures. They require significant improvement before becoming an alternative energy option.

The journey toward inexpensive, widely-available, environmentally-friendly alternative energy is still in its infancy. The American mindset that alternatives are always there for the taking may soon be in for a rude awakening.