Thank you, CraigHB! 
There have been some who claim that the US should have let a high-level delegation witness a nuke bomb test and that they would then have convinced the Japanese military to surrender. I have always regarded that as one of the most preposterous assertions ever committed. The real and feasible alternatives facing the US and Allies and Japan in Summer 1945 were pretty much what i stated - - horrible, all of them. One should never be ashamed to choose the least harmful option if the others are truly worse, and they were.
The theme of alternatives, viable ones, feasible ones, permeates this little thread. The US and world have plenty of fossil fuels to burn for many more decades. In fact, that's precisely what will happen absent alternative energy sources, so comparisons should start there. All that combustion might screw up the weather, will screw up the air, and might screw the forests and seas (acidity), but that's what will happen. I recall a couple decades ago when a top theory was that a host of breeder reactors would be built that would make hydrogen for vehicle fuel use and distribution, and maybe desalinization while they were at it. That is technically feasible, but I doubt it is politically practicable. Still, let brown-outs keep interrupting folks HD TV shows, blow driers, and microwaves, and nearly anything could become politically viable.
I do think nuclear power is a far better option than fossil and even most bio-renewables. There seems a basic problem in making fuel out of food when so many are hungry. Switchgrass seems better than corn, for example, for such reasons but, heck, maybe hemp would work. I think corn was chosen and works as well as it does because the US already grew lots of it and knew how to harvest, transport, etc. Nonetheless, if PV solar or fusion or something else shows up, I'd go with it as long as it did the job. Nuclear would do it and do it well, but there are probably other solutions with better technology. I am not wedded to any one solution, but simply to the need for one.
One pet peeve of mine is when folk point out what they see as bad things about a course of action and use them as bases for arguing not to do it, when they offer no alternative because they know that the others are worse by far.
If some biofuel gets grown in great volume, I suspect the oil companies will do fine anyway. The fluid fuel would still need to be processed, transported, distributed, and sold, and the oil companies already have the infrastructure to do all of that. In short, the oil companies would make money selling it, even as their legacy wells and refineries continued to churn out products for those unable to convert. If anything, they would grow richer, as exploration and drilling costs would drop off their books.
