Ethanol...nothing but corn?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sunk more than $17million over the past two years into a state fleet of 1,138 environmentally friendly cars and trucks that have traveled a collective 10million miles and burned more than 413,202 gallons of gas. Kimberly Kindey in the DailyNews.

But the "flex fuel" vehicles have not used one drop of high-grade ethanol - the fuel that promised to turn the fleet into clean-burning driving machines - because the vehicles have no access to ethanol pumping stations. There was none when the Chevrolet Impala sedans and Silverado trucks were purchased, and none is scheduled to open until December 2009.

Even worse, the flex-fuel vehicles are churning out more smog and greenhouse gases than many vehicles in the state's standard fleet. For every 15,000 miles traveled, for instance, the flex-fuel Impala releases an average 8.5tons of greenhouse gases compared with 7.3tons from the Ford Focus it replaced, federal officials said.

As a result, energy experts question whether the administration's zest to look "green" has come at the expense of real environmental progress.