I don’t mean to sound smug, but you’ll notice that the doom and gloom economic predictions made in the article your reply was based upon were made in September, 2008.
While near term corn prices traded in the $5 to $6 range in September ‘08, and your author predicted they would skyrocket higher, near term corn prices are now trading in the $3 to $4 range, having closed yesterday on the CME at $3.762.
36 Billion bushels of corn, by the way, would be sufficient to produce over 100 billion gallons of fuel grade ethanol. The US only uses a total of about 64 Billion gallons of gasoline in a year.
Not smug, but at least you have some facts to support your argument rather than just debasing someone like the other guy did.
I refer you to this document, particularly pages 23-27.
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=484
The George Marshall Institute is highly regarded and on a factual basis is hard to argue with. Their assessments do not paint a bright future for ethanol unless radical changes in technology occur or if we debase the forests as well as fields.
There are other potentially interesting articles within regarding the technology and politics of ethanol.