If you do ethanol right, you use the leaves, stalks and cobs from the corn, not the grain.

If you want to do ethanol really right, you use sugar beets instead of corn at all. Or switchgrass. Or cane, as the ill-fated CBS series with Jimmy Smits posited in the pre-strike fall season.

But corn-based ethanol, as the link above proves, has some big (Surprise!) proponents — and they’ve got lobbying power:

What companies stand to benefit from increased ethanol use?
There is a crop of American ethanol producers. ADM is by far the largest, pumping out about one-quarter of the U.S. total. MGP Ingredients (MGPI) is one of the many smaller companies involved. Verasun Energy and Aventine Renewable Energy, two other producers of note, have recently filed to go public.

If you do ethanol right, you use the leaves, talks and cobs from the corn, not the grain. Or wood chips, or whatever — old pasteboard, even, maybe, if it’s got cellulose in it.

You wanna be rich beyond the dreams of avarice? Figure out how to run America’s cars on cellulite.

We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0

1. count me among the folks who don’t believe that ethanol is the price-driver demon it’s being made out to be. i’ve wanted to post on this, but good data is hard to come by. like most things corporate-controlled in our society, transparency is sorely lacking.

2. even if it were, much of the rest of the world has to daily make the choice between paying for food and paying for fuel, clothing, shelter, damn near everything [and has always had to]. i’m not going to cry for americans [most of them anyway] who have to start making some of those choices too.

3. but feel free to not listen to me, though.

I know what you are saying hipparchia—and hi! hope you are well now!—about other countries having it worse. That’s true. But many people here who don’t make a lot of money have to drive to work, especially when there is no public transportation, as in many rural areas. They are the American people getting crunched the worse by such decisions, without any consideration for helping their situations—or at least not making their lives impossible. Ironically, some of them live in corn country.
This is an “old” Environmental News Network story from June 2008 (some things have shifted a bit since then: the price of crude oil has dropped slightly) but, as you say, the whole biofuel thing is a worldwide issue, and what we do in America does have an effect internationally too: http://www.enn.com/business/article/3735…

Haw!

That said, when did it ever make sense to merge the markets for fuel and food?

Well, I guess it makes sense to the people who own what passes through the markets….

I was really surprised when HRC was in favor of this in the beginning of the campaign. Does anyone remember what her later views were?

Did you mean cellulose? You just mentioned it in the preceding sentence, so I thought it might be a Freudian slip.
But running them on cellulite would be something. I am waiting for the day when someone is able to convert cat poop to energy. I won’t be needing any solar panels.