Yes, the ethanol scam is one of my pet peeves.  It’s like the Global Warming is caused by man scam, if you say a lie often enough people believe the lie.  I think President Bush is buying into the scam for political expediency, encouraged on by his advisors.  I refuse to believe he actually has succumbed to the lie.

Here are some previous stories I’ve covered on the ethanol scam:

Corporate Welfare for Big Agriculture

Higher Prices At The Pump - Blame It On Ethanol Mandates

Corn Ethanol - Fallacies Exposed (not that anyone will listen)

American Energy Independence Plan

From Opinion Journal we read: Very, Very Big Corn (Ethanol and its consequences)

snip….That’s one reason why, as Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren note in the Milken Institute Review, federal and state subsidies for ethanol ran to about $6 billion last year, equivalent to roughly half its wholesale market price. Ethanol gets a 51-cent a gallon domestic subsidy, and there’s another 54-cent a gallon tariff applied at the border against imported ethanol. Without those subsidies, hardly anyone would make the stuff, much less buy it–despite recent high oil prices.

That’s also why the percentage of the U.S. corn crop devoted to ethanol has risen to 20% from 3% in just five years, or about 8.6 million acres of farmland.

snip….No wonder, then, that the price of corn rose nearly 80% in 2006 alone. snip…..It’s even worse for cattle, poultry and hog farmers trying to adjust to suddenly exorbitant prices for feed corn–to pick just one industry example. The price of corn is making America’s meat-packing industries, which are major exporters, less competitive.

snip….As for the environmental impact, well, where do we begin? As an oxygenate, ethanol increases the level of nitrous oxides in the atmosphere and thus causes smog. The scientific literature is also divided about whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says ethanol’s net energy output is a marginal improvement of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10 to one.

And because corn-based ethanol is less efficient than ordinary gasoline, using it to fuel cars means you need more gas to drive the same number of miles. This is not exactly a route to “independence” from Mideast, Venezuelan or any other tainted source of oil. Ethanol also cannot be shipped using existing pipelines (being alcohol, it eats the seals), so it must be trucked or sent by barge or train to its thousand-and-one destinations, at least until separate pipelines are built.

snip….But what about global warming, where ethanol, as a non-fossil fuel, is supposed to make a positive contribution? Actually, it barely makes a dent. Australian researcher Robert Niven finds that the use of ethanol in gasoline–the standard way in which ethanol is currently used–reduces greenhouse gas emissions by no more than 5%. As Messrs. Taylor and Van Doren observe, “employing ethanol to reduce greenhouse gases is fantastically inefficient,” costing as much as 16 times the optimal abatement cost for removing a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.

snip…Not that any of these facts are likely to make much difference in the current Washington debate. The corn and sugar lobbies have their roots deep in both parties, and now they have the mantra of “energy independence” to invoke, however illusory it is. If anything, Congress may add to Mr. Bush’s ethanol mandate requests.

So here comes Big Corn. Make that Very, Very Big Corn. Sooner or later, our experience with this huge public gamble may make us yearn for the efficiency, capacity, lower cost and–yes–superior environmental record of “Big Oil.”

For all you haters or blamers of “Big Oil” and you rabid environmentalists who prevent any new refineries from being built, who block exploration in ANWAR or off US coasts or those who blame the Iraq War on the US dependence on Middle Eastern oil - I’m wondering is Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill going to become your new evil demon of the next decade?  Course the US can’t and doesn’t provide enough corn production for this ethanol scam and corn is currently imported to meet the demand so will there be an outcry on foreign corn?  

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