...and no doubt another quarter of the corn crop goes to poisoning the people through High Fructose Corn Syrup
Profits before people once again. Go figure...

Ethanol should only come from nonfood and nonararian land sources ( as algae from garbage {water consumption problem?}).

Plus the carbon versus energy equation should be studied for effectiveness.

Its absurd to be turning food into fuel, especially when it took fuel to produce it.

Another unintended consequence of policy that sounds good, is politically correct and passed by people that consider little else.

We can hope that better care is taken on some other foolish proposals.

Clearly, we must "incorporate" the automobile. When cars become people, who could deny them their daily bread?

@Cosmicharlie

"...and no doubt another quarter of the corn crop goes to poisoning the people through High Fructose Corn Syrup
Profits before people once again. Go figure..."

Add that to feed for Animals ... don't know what is left for 'real' food, not in factories.

Can we have a 'Personhood' for Automobiles too !!

As the majority of corn is feed for livestock, I would expect the amount used to feed people is less than half. So a quarter of that would mean that biofuels use less than ten percent of the crop as a whole.

In 2008, when folks were complaining that food prices were driven higher by biofuel use, the actual consumption was a few percentage points. Corn and wheat prices were mostly influenced by the draught in Australia and a shortage propagated by farmers projecting a greater need for soy products instead.

A survey also demonstrated that the majority of owners of flex fuel vehicles didn't know what it meant. Of those who knew that their vehicles could consume E85 fuel, most didn't use it because E85 prices weren't low enough to offset the loss of fuel economy -- especially in many urban areas where E85 prices moved in unison with regular gasoline prices.

I question the legitimacy of the 25% claim. Was that how much was being made and stored while there are incentives for production or is that how much was consumed as fuel? E10 fuel has been required in urban areas for decades, but I don't think higher percentage ethanol fuels have seen a greater rate of adoption in the past two years.

I do, however, favor biofuels recovered from waste products over those derived from food crops.

Even MORE noteworthy and requiring ACTION is that over 98% of soy crops and over 50% of corn in the U.S. are fed to factory-farmed animals.

Furthermore, I am a little irked that COMMON DREAMS is NOT reporting on the substantial amount of grains used by factory farms that could be fed directly to people.

And where are the articles on www.worldwatch.org/ww/livestock whose studies show 51% of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock?

Recent UN studies report that FACTORY FARMS contribute 40% MORE to climate change than all transport (CARS, TRUCKS, SHIPS, PLANES, TRAINS) COMBINED.

We are always going to need cars and most of us cannot afford to buy new hybrids or electric.

WE CAN however, adopt a plant-based diet.

No more excuses, we can, and need to, heal ourselves and heal the planet at the same time.

I would sincerely love to hear ANY objections and OR fears about adopting a plant-based diet.

I was fearless; there must be others out there as fearless or more fearless than me.

Anybody?

It's interesting that the US is bombing and occupying half the middle east to ensure access to "a critically important resource," and - at the same time - pissing away its food crops.

Should the world invade and occupy Nebraska? Food is a fairly strategic resource for the rest of the world, after all. It helps people avoid collapsing into an unconscious ball of hypoglycemia (I'm trying to explain the science).

CORN ETHANOL DOES NOT REDUCE THE FOOD SUPPLY!

Do you know what happens to what is left over from corn ethanol production? It is cattle feed (distiller grains is the technical term). It replaces unprocessed corn in cows diets.

When you make ethanol you take some of the sugar out of the corn and leave the protein, cellulose (indigestable to human carbos)and fats. This is actually better for the cows as they don't do so good on high sugar feed. There is some evidence they may even fart less (make less methane) than with straight corn.

There are plenty of reasons to think poorly about corn ethanol like all the fossil fuel inputs, all the GMOs and the absurd subsidies.

You have to think who benefits by the phony food vs fuel argument (now what does that corn ethanol replace in your gas tank????)

There is an old Randy Newman song:
Let's Burn Down the Cornfield.

Three words: Hemp! Hemp! Hemp!

Diverting so much human food is a crime against humanity but what else can be done with Monsanto's Frankenfood?

"We can more than meet the demand for food and livestock feed while reducing our dependence on foreign oil through the production of homegrown renewable ethanol"

The current demand for food and livestock feed is not legitimate. Over one third of food transported to retail in the USA is not eaten, but sent to landfills to produce methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas.

The average transit distance for that food is over one thousand five hundred miles. That food is transported in a very inefficient manner, not by rail, but by trucks which are ten times less efficient than rail.

The current demand for food and livestock is not legitimate because it was synthesized from the experiments of marketeers backed by truckloads of funny munny, allocated for enterprises that support the global fossil-fuel "great games".

Ethanol for personal transport is one of them. So are meat/dairy. To produce a gallon of ethanol from corn requires 3/4 of a gallon of fuel input. In contrast, to produce a gallon of biodiesel requires only 1/3 of a gallon of fuel input. Clearly, the USA has, once again, chosen the wrong path. It so consistently chooses the wrong path because its goal is not increased value in markets but increased economic activity, so if it can find ways to waste huge volumes of resources, under adequate camouflage, it pursues them with a vengeance.

When the ethanol mandate was imposed, I thought it was just a boondoggle for ADM and a payoff to farm-state Republican senators, while giving the Bush administration a faux-green PR talking point.

Now I think it may have also had the purpose of economic warfare, denying countries that need our corn, soy and wheat exports to survive. (I know that corn is primarily animal feed, and soy is to a large degree. Some, I don't know how much, land was diverted from other crops to corn.)

Agriculture was one of the few areas where the US had a trade surplus, or close to an equal balance of trade. That ethanol might have pushed this balance toward the red mattered not at all, of course, to the Bushies, who wanted to bankrupt the government.

This article and previous comments miss key points. First, people are hungry because of a surplus of food, not a shortage. This is the long term issue. About half of the world are rural. Least Developed Countries are 70% rural. We've never (recently) had people hungry because of a shortage of food. They're hungry because of a shortage of income. So in LDCs, being rural, income comes from decent farm prices. Oversupply of grain and low prices cause hunger.

The US dominates farm exports, as the article mentions, but unlike OPEC in oil, we've tried to lose money on exports, to secretly subsidize domestic and multinational processors and traders and animal factories with below cost grain and cotton. We set the world prices, often, but we choose to set them where we lose on exports. Then later we added compensatory subsidies for farmers, to partially compensate their losses. Farmers then take all the blame, while the below cost grains make the big corps rich, off the books.

Farmers have invested in ethanol to make up for when they lose on grain. It's a way to spread risk. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported ethanol, as it should raise farm prices without government help. This also helps end LDC poverty. The below cost grains, however, have added to the clout of agribusiness, and farm policy has gotten worse under increased corporate domination.

But then, after dumping on LDCs for a quarter century, there was a rapid spike in prices. So first low prices created the poverty, then food prices rose. The rise in farm prices helps LDC farmers, but it's largely too little too lathe and the volatility (up and down prices) is damaging.

The ethanol industry has subsidies, and also the hidden subsidy of below cost grain. With the price spike, however, costs have surged as the Monsantos, John Deeres etc. gobbled up the farm profits. Meanwhile, (also not mentioned here) ethanol plants went broke with the higher grain prices. With much higher costs, farmers certainly can't produce grain as cheaply as they did 5 years ago when they were really losing on every bushel, (but at lower costs).

People in LDCs need stable, reasonably high grain prices. We help by exporting at a profit. We need grain and cotton price floors and (international) supply management, and on the top side, price ceilings and reserve supplies.

LDC farmers also need the value added of livestock income to help them out of poverty to create wealth and jobs. (Cheap grain includes animal factories, as grasslands are not needed.) Livestock are also important to sustainability. With higher grain prices grass fed livestock aren't competing with below cost grain fed to livestock, and less grain is needed. Corn and soybean land can be put back into grass and forages/hay, and more diversified "resource conserving crop rotations" (a requirement for organic certification) can be used (ie. small grains, which also provide straw for livestock).

These are progressive issues, but they are still poorly understood by progressives. See the major online progressive articles on this here: http://www dot zcommunications.org/zspace/bradwilson