and the price of beef and the price of pork and the price of corn flakes ...
And it takes more petroleum energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than the gallon of ethanol produces.
Um, no it doesn’t. You’re operating off an analysis by Pimmental, which has been debunked forever. He includes the energy required to melt the steel to make the tractors and tillage implements in his energy balance spreadsheet, which is patently silly.
Ethanol’s energy balance depends mostly on whether the resulting distillers’ grains are dried, or used wet. When wet DG’s are used as cattle feed, the energy balance is actually pretty good.