There is plenty of corn to go around. If you stop using it for ethanol, what will you do with the overproduction? This is not the kind of corn people eat, you know. It’s the kind of corn used for corn meal, high-fructose corn syrup (an essential ingredient in soft drinks), animal feed, carpet, shoe polish and other industrial commodities in addition to ethanol.
And you do know that ethanol producers only use the starch portion of the kernel – the rest of the kernel is returned as a concentrated protein feed for livestock. Every bushel of corn used for ethanol already yields both fuel AND food. Distillers grains (the high-protein by-product) is in high demand, especially for cattle feeding. You like beef, you should like ethanol.
Okay, first off a gallon of ninety percent gasoline and ten percent ethanol will give you at least eight percent LESS mileage than a gallon of pure gasoline, meaning you can travel nearly the same distance on the nine tenths of a gallon of gasoline WITHOUT the one tenth of a gallon of ethanol. That would seem to make the whole idea mathematically absurd.
So you’re saying that crony-capitalist welfare-queen farmers would continue to “overproduce” corn if the EPA didn’t mandate the use of highly inefficient ethanol in fuel?
Ethanol has 60% of the BTUs of gasoline, so you get 40% less miles per gallon with it, and it destroys engines.
But as long as it’s money in your pocket, too bad, right?
Screw everybody else.