You know I’ve never understood the concept of subsidizing ethanol. What sense does it make to turn your food supply into a fossil fuel substitute when there’s tons of fossil fuel you won’t touch?
I mean if we had no more domestic supply that might become a debatable issue but really it’s not. With commodity prices for food going up, up, up it makes no sense to use arable land for government supported BS like ethanol.
I didn't either for awhile, but here goes:
In America and similar western culture nations, our food supply is not radically impacted by using food crops for fuel, but the rest of the world is seriously dependent on these food crops for supply and stability of an affordable price of food for those citizens.
An unmentioned major provocation for the current world "democracy demonstrations" and citizen unrest, is food prices and shortages.
The American Marxists are thrilled and support these uprisings in any nation with a government friendly to or cooperating with the USA in the recent past. Muslim Brotherhood governments will replace those that fall to "democracy", US influence and trustworthiness will fall worldwide, and war against Israel will break out.
Does any of this sound like a wish list of the progressive Marxist left, and those named Hussein?
Maybe "environmentalist" (the new spelling of "communist") driven bans on petro development have had an ulterior purpose from the beginning.
Worse, somewhere in the world some innocent kids* are starving to death because we are burning food for fuel. If the world had an oversupply of food, this would not be an issue, but that’s not the case.
Only if you can produce ethanol from land (or sea?) that will not support food crops does it make sense. And even then there are other factors to consider.
*Granted, the parents are also to blame for having kids they can’t feed, but that’s not the children’s fault.