WWIIIFollow

but he's not totally loony about it.

And you trust Bush to do it the right way?

No, but unless you guys are stupid enough to elect members of the Bush family for the next 40 years, I wouldn't worry about it.

Agreed. Part of why we're so into corn-based ethanol is because we have a lot of corn. And farmers are willing to grow corn because, if it's not used in biofuels, it'll be used in food production and either way they make a sale. You can't say the same about switchgrass. Also, it's easily storable in relatively raw form which you can't say about sugar beets or Jeruslem artichokes.

As the technology increases and it becomes a more stable market, you'll probably see some farmers switching to crops which yield a better energy return and other farmers sticking with the corn market.

But see that's the problem. If all the corn producers turns to new GE'd energy plant instead of human consumption grade corn cause the former is more profitable, you'll end up with shortage of regular corn.

World starvation is not a product of our corn market. It's social more than anything.

The push for ethanol and other biofuels has spawned an industry that depends on billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies, and not only in the United States. In 2005, global ethanol production was 9.66 billion gallons, of which Brazil produced 45.2 percent (from sugar cane) and the United States 44.5 percent (from corn). Global production of biodiesel (most of it in Europe), made from oilseeds, was almost one billion gallons.

The industry's growth has meant that a larger and larger share of corn production is being used to feed the huge mills that produce ethanol. According to some estimates, ethanol plants will burn up to half of U.S. domestic corn supplies within a few years. Ethanol demand will bring 2007 inventories of corn to their lowest levels since 1995 (a drought year), even though 2006 yielded the third-largest corn crop on record. Iowa may soon become a net corn importer

The enormous volume of corn required by the ethanol industry is sending shock waves through the food system. (The United States accounts for some 40 percent of the world's total corn production and over half of all corn exports.) In March 2007, corn futures rose to over $4.38 a bushel, the highest level in ten years. Wheat and rice prices have also surged to decade highs, because even as those grains are increasingly being used as substitutes for corn, farmers are planting more acres with corn and fewer acres with other crops.

The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year.

Is it just me or the solution is not to turn our food into fuel but to stop driving fucking SUVs