No - I don’t like the idea of ethanol fuel. I also don’t like gov’t intervention. Don’t mandate it, don’t subsidize it, don’t limit it. If the ethanol producers think they can make money on it on the free market - great! (Cruz said their are cars in other countries that run on 50% ethanol).
The trouble is, if we burn our food as “cheap” fuel, then food gets more expensive. (All crops). Of course then the farmers will figure that out pretty quick. “Hey everyone is growing corn for fuel - and the price of beans is way up. I’ll grow beans!”
The trouble with corn - it takes a lot of fertilizer and water compared to other crops. Even the greenies now are against ethanol because of that.
Because corn is such a heavy feeder, being upbred from maze, it cannot be grown without rotation or Petro Chemical based fertilizers.
Corn is a vicious circle, once you go there for three generations, your soil is like a Meth Junkie, it will not produce without a fix.
And once you mono crop such a heavy feeder in the same spot, your crops become massively dependent on petro chemical insecticides, nature hates mono crops.
Americas industry runs on Corn, and oil. You cannot have corn without oil in the scale we now produce it.
A good read is “The Omnivores Dilemma”, written from a leftist viewpoint, it was a real eye opener for me none the less.
“The trouble is, if we burn our food as “cheap” fuel, then food gets more expensive. (All crops). Of course then the farmers will figure that out pretty quick. “Hey everyone is growing corn for fuel - and the price of beans is way up. I’ll grow beans!—
I agree with everything you posted. The oil companies came up with MTBE as an additive to reduce emissions. They had a deal going since it was a throwaway byproduct of refining. The problem was that it was “persisitent” and began to poison our groundwater, so they troted out Ethanol as an alternative. But it too is problematic when used in large quantities in IC Engines. So now the government has it’s butt in a crack because the corn farmers like being rich at taxpayers expense. My bet is that Cruz, being in the pocket of the oil companies, wants Ethanol out not because it’s a bad idea, but because the oil companies make more money if gasoline is all gasoline. 99% of the time, all you have to do to figure out why something is so, is to follow the money and who makes it.