'Cash for Clunkers' not much help

The government's stimulus plan of offering money for people to get rid of their clunkers for a more fuel efficient one seems to be penny wise and pound foolish. Most of these so -called clunkers average about 16 miles per gallon while a newer and even smaller car will only net you at best about 4 miles more per gallon.

With that in mind, your so-called savings won't even make a dent in your monthly car payments. It would seem that stimulus money could be better spent to develop a cheap ersatz fuel and to modify our present engines to use it.

A page from history shows us that a war time Germany had to rapidly develop an ersatz fuel when their main supply from the Ploesti oil fields in Romania was sharply curtailed because of merciless American bombing raids. They rapidly started distilling gasoline from coal, which they had plenty of and their war machine kept rolling on, much to the world's consternation.

Walter Santi

Bloomingdale