flynn23 wrote:

The greens, hawks, and farmers helped convince the Senate to add an ethanol provision to the energy bill—now awaiting action by a House-Senate conference committee—that would require refiners to more than double their use of ethanol to 8 billion gallons per year by 2012. The provision is the latest installment of the ethanol subsidy, a handout that has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars during the last three decades, with little to show for it. It also shovels yet more federal cash on the single most subsidized crop in America, corn.

I'm pretty certain that the anti-ethanol article that I meme'd here is being generated as a salvo targeting these groups and probably aiming squarely at ADM, the nation's largest corn producer. I'm all for battling it out from a market perspective, but with so much at stake, is it really worthwhile to battle ideologies?

I'm inclined to agree with you, flynn. Almost all alternative technologies and fuels simply don't stack up when compared to coal and oil because of their high abundance and energy content, respectively. The point should not necessarily be to make tons of money off the venture into biofuel, but to rather change the thinking about transportation as a one-woman man. It also proves to the world that America, with her abundance of crop land, can hold her own if oil disappears from the global landscape.

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Now don't make me whip out my economist hat and tear that to pieces. There's no fucking way that gasoline is nearly 1/5 the energy cost to produce than ethanol. Not unless you are not factoring in things like economies of scale, depreciation, and existing plant.

Actually, yes, there is a way. It is simply a question of technology efficiencies and time. Oil has been used universally for over a century, yet ethanol has only been dappled in for a fraction of that time. Harvesting corn and processing it many times to get ethanol has significant energy implications. However, most of the people I've worked with at Georgia Tech feel that, with significant technology leaps, corn will be the next transportation fuel, not hydrogen, because we're so much closer to the technological breakthrough required for wide implementation. I don't have any personal feelings about either fuel, but I do think that using corn to power our cars would only serve to piss off more of the world in which several million go hungry each day.

-janelane, cautiously

RE: The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine.