but it also drives up the cost of... fuel. Basically, right now it takes 1.1 calories of input for every calorie of output from those technologies, and guess where the input calories come from?
Yep, oil. It's actually less efficient than just burning gasoline/diesel/etc directly. OTOH, it's a GREAT vote buyer in the farm belt, where people seem to think they have some god-given right to certainty in income denied to most of us.