The destructive myth of corn ethanol

Have you noticed the price of an ear of corn lately? It's the height of summer when we'd all be loving to grill some corn on the barbecue, yet we feel lucky if we can find it at 50 cents an ear. Well, blame your politicians for driving up the price of every product using corn from tortillas in Mexico to feed for cattle. All to follow the elusive dream of cheap, clean fuel from ethanol. Rolling Stone Magazine, of all places, has an article about what a destructive myth this is.

Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

Read the rest to find out why Rolling stone calls ethanol "dangerous, delusional b******t."

Link via Mark J. Perry.