A few readers have chided me for taking too lightly the hardships imposed by the rising cost of gasoline. I want them to know that I empathize with people who are struggling to afford enough fuel to take them to work and back and then to the supermarket, where fuel costs are also driving up food costs. That’s why I’m proposing a revolutionary fuel called “Rumzu.”

The fuel crisis will only get worse when more than a billion Chinese discover the joys of outdoor grilling of steaks, chicken and chops as opposed to the stir-frying of veggies and bits and pieces of meat to flavor their rice. It takes more grain to raise a water buffalo to eating size than it does to raise a Chinese child to working size.

We’re caught in a cruel bind: Our friends in Asia are eating more meat, which requires the growing of more grain. They’re also buying (and manufacturing) more automobiles, which demand more fuel. One of the solutions to the energy crisis is the use of ethanol, which is made from grain. With the Chinese feeding their grain to livestock instead of eating it themselves, the price of grain will go up, in obedience to the law of supply and demand. With 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians discovering the joys of motoring, the same law dictates an increase in the price of motor fuel — unless we can find a way of increasing the supply.

The problem seems to have stumped the geniuses at Exxon, BP and Shell. That leaves it to me to apply redneck smarts to the task of solving our fuel problems.

The answer seems obvious: find a way to grow our own energy. We don’t want to take up good farm land growing sugar cane or corn or whatever to be used in making ethanol. We need corn and cane for our bourbon and rum.

So why not turn to a crop that will grow anywhere and is not now widely used for foodstuff. You guessed it: kudzu.

I know that kudzu is not overly laden with sugar or other stuff that can be cheaply converted to fuel or to rum. But haven’t any of those energy moguls heard of genetic engineering? Inject some DNA from sugar cane into kudzu, and suddenly it’s oozing with sweet, rum-quality sap, and the South has become the Saudi Arabia of ethanol. We could keep our automobiles, trucks and SUVs running on Rumzu and still have enough left for daiquiris and pina coladas.

If it works with kudzu, why not with dandelions? Some people already make wine out of dandelions. Drop some sugar-cane DNA into dandelion seeds and pretty soon every suburban household with a decent-sized lawn will become self-sufficient in energy.

We can also learn a lesson from Jurassic Park. That film proved the feasibility of converting fossilized DNA into living, breathing animals. It should also be possible to bring back the plants and animals that fossilized into petroleum and implant their DNA into pine trees so that their sap takes the form of crude instead of rosin. Then we could just cut into the pine bark and let the oily sap drip into little containers, to be harvested and hauled off to the refinery.

That’s just one way of solving the problem. The other way is to change our traveling culture.

If you’ve ever driven Interstate 85 from Richmond to Montgomery, you have witnessed a colossal waste of energy, and you have put your life at dire risk as well jockeying with 18-wheelers and SUVs hurtling through Durham, Greensboro, Charlotte and Greenville and on through the deadliest speedway of them all — Atlanta. It would be much easier on our energy supply if we laid double tracks of steel rails down the medians of those Interstates and ran fast, comfortable trains down them. Would you want to duel the lumbering semis and swaggering SUVs between Montgomery and Birmingham when you could hop aboard a comfortable train and enjoy a refreshing beverage in the club car while you covered the distance safely in the space of an hour or hour and a half?  I wouldn’t.

How would you get to Legion Field in Birmingham without your 9-passenger SUV? Just take a shuttle bus or rent a motor scooter or mini-car at the train station. Local transportation could become part of the rapid-rail package.

Sure, the rail transit couldn’t fill all your transportation needs, but it could reduce the need for bus-sized vehicles to take the family anywhere from Prattville to Yosemite. Reserve the family car for local trips, and you can get by with 60 or 70 horsepower instead of 285 horsepower, which should lower your fuel consumption, especially if that’s 60 or 70 hybrid horsepower. Remember those Volkswagen Beetles that used to cruise all day at 70 mph? They had 30-horsepower engines.

I’ve reserved my most radical proposal for last, in case all other proposals are rejected: Rely on people power. Design lightweight cars with a built-in set of pedals for each passenger. Pedaling to work, to play or to the mall would keep us in shape. Soccer moms could let the kids do the pedaling.

But let’s not give up on the idea of Rumzu. The harvesting and refining of kudzu would give the South a whole new industry to replace our long-gone textile industry. It might give us a surplus of beverages to sip on our the front porches of an evening. And it would beat the stuffings out of pedaling.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.