Gasoline is currently very expensive, compared to what it was years ago, and the reason for this high cost is obvious; as petroleum becomes more scarce, a greater amount of time and effort is required to drill it from the earth, and then refine it into useable fuel.
A remedy for this dilemma of which I have become aware in recent years is synthetic fuels, fuels that are manufactured in a laboratory, rather than being refined from petroleum mined from the ground, and the advantages of such fuels are obvious and significant.
First, synthetic fuels can be manufactured for only a small fraction of the time and effort that is required to produce fossil fuels, since they do not need to be extracted from the earth or refined, while petroleum takes millions of years to form, and thus shall be far less expensive. Second, they can be manufactured specifically to burn more cleanly and last longer, thus saving the environment and money from customers. Third, they can be manufactured from virtually anything, such as prairie grass, scraps of food from restaurants or farms, or other forms of organic waste, such as parts of animals that shall not be consumed by humans.
As great as this idea may be, I have not seen any evidence that synthetic fuels are used very much, since gasoline is still very expensive. While I do believe that the best possible solution for energy and environmental crises are to switch from gasoline cars to electric cars and to replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar and nuclear plants, a reasonable strategy to use while that transition is made would be synthetic fuels. What does everyone else say about this? Why are synthetic fuels not more prevalent?