Reason #79: Ethanol, Another Phony Solution

Another stupid idea that politicians like to pitch is filling our tanks with corn ethanol. But again, it’s nothing but another boondoggle that lets politicians act like they’re doing something about our energy needs.

First of all, corn ethanol is horribly inefficient. Turning an ear of corn into fuel costs more than a dollar a gallon and it eats up almost as much fuel as it yields. What’s more, it corrodes pipelines, meaning every drop of it has to be hauled to the pump in tanker trucks. So we not only burn tons of energy just to make the stuff, we have to burn even more fuel to get it into our gas tanks.

Washington DC has turned the most important challenge facing our nation today into just another excuse to help their corporate donors.

But most importantly, ethanol will never make more than a dent in our appetite for gasoline. Even if every last acre of corn in the country were used for ethanol, that would only supply about 12 percent of our energy needs. And with all that corn going to make gas instead of taco shells and corn sweetener and dairy feed, our nation’s cupboards would be bare. We need corn for food, not for gas.

Farmers have already switched a quarter of the corn harvest to ethanol, and our grocery bills are rising because of it. Thanks to the ethanol boom, a bushel of corn now costs double what it did just a few years ago, and since corn goes into almost everything we eat these days, food prices are following suit. All for a crop that won’t even come close to making us energy independent.

Worst of all, we taxpayers are paying dearly for this “fuelish” nonsolution, as politicians from corn growing states like Iowa and Nebraska have pushed through billions in ethanol subsidies. Even with ethanol’s obvious drawbacks, some of those subsidies might be acceptable if they went to family farmers. But almost all of them go to agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Commentator Tom Philpott estimated that for every dollar ADM makes on Ethanol, the U.S. Treasury shells out almost $3.

So instead of seeking a real solution, Washington DC has turned the most important challenge facing our nation today into just another excuse to help their corporate donors. Meanwhile, the problem itself is nowhere near being fixed.

NEXT: Reason #80: Off-Amtrak - (No One) Aboard!