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No, you’re not getting the error of Pimmental’s methodology.

Pimmental was including the energy costs of making the steel for farm equipment and the food the farmer eats AS THOUGH it would never have been consumed if only the farmer didn’t turn his corn into ethanol.

This is an entirely false assumption. The farmer is going to farm. He’s going to buy that equipment, regardless of whether or not there is ethanol in the fuel market. There are plenty of farmers selling corn to ethanol plants running equipment from the 1970’s. When we farmed, I think the most recent pieces of equipment we had were mid-90’s vintage. Most all our tractors were from 1979 or earlier, our tillage equipment was from the 1970’s as well. The energy that went into those machines is a “sunk cost.” It has been spent, there is no way to get it back, and what is more, if the farmer is going to continue growing food, he’s going to buy steel in the form of farm equipment.

The energy input accounting for the food the farmer ate was even more laughable. The farmer could, in some mythological world (which is most of academia) forego the energy consumption that comes from using steel in farm equipment if he chose to not farm *at all*.

But the food intake of the farmer can be “solved” by only one thing: Killing the farmer, preferably before he’s born so he never even increases his mother’s consumption of food.

That’s what is utterly bankrupt about Pimmental’s methodology. The steel energy costs are going to remain the same, because the farmer is going to either farm something else or the equipment pre-existed ethanol policy. The energy the farmer takes in as food is going to remain in place until he dies, regardless of what he does with respect to making ethanol.