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Some very important points a lot of folks are missing;

Most any alternative to Muslim produced petroleum and the financing of our enemy’s terrorism is worth doing for national security interests alone. Add in to keep the money in the American economy instead of shipping it by the boat load to our enemies and yes it is well worth going thru some growing pains to achieve energy independence.

All hit pieces on ethanol I have ever read ignore a basic fact of ethanol, distilling the ethanol our of corn leaves the corn behind as a high value by product called brewer’s grain.

If the story ignores the brewer’s grains you know right off it is a hit piece on ethanol and short on facts.

This brewers grain can and is being made into hundreds of food and industrial products.

Yes you can make taco shells out of brewers grain, and cow feed and dog feed and breakfast cereals and many industrial chemicals. Brewer’s grain comes wet instead of dry so they have to change the recipes and maybe some of the machinery to utilize it.

Tiny Eddyville Iowa has a 1.5 billion dollar, 1,600 acre, corn processing complex that passes the corn from independent plant to independent plant by augers and pipeline until the corn is consumed, each company drawing off the parts of the corn kernel that they want to utilize.

Indian Hills Community College works closely with the companys and trains people to work there.

The concept that the latest raise in corn prices would not have happened but for ethanol is false. Corn adjusts upward every few years to catch up with inflation just like everything else does. One year it was a big order from China that spiked corn prices and raised corn growing land values all over the Midwest. Other times drouth and crop failures have occured. Yes people have a fit then too and congress usually gets in an uproar over it.

We were due for an adjustment and if not ethanol, something else would have bumped prices.

Good points about the other sources of energy; in fact hundreds of sources of energy are being researched and developed right now. Green algae fed with carbon dioxide emissions from coal power plants is showing promise. They say it is 50 percent oil.

Iowa now has 3 busy manufacturing plants making windmill generator components.

larry

If national security was the issue, we would develop our own viable energy sources. National security is only a side issue. The entire idea of energy independence is ridiculous. Energy is a world wide commodity in various forms. We are growing more interdependent on energy as we are on almost every other industrial area.

Corn based ethanol is a product that consumers do not want. Ethanol corrodes engine components and contains only 2/3 energy as unleaded gasoline. Corn-based ethanol has also been linked to smog increases particularly in the Rocky Mountain region in Colorado.

Corn-based ethanol would not exist in its current form without massive mandates and subsidies. If ethanol is the answer, there is no reason to maintain the tarriff on foreign ethanol. The farm state representatives have extracted massive handouts from the rest of the country due to the battle over control of the Senate. For reasons that I do not understand, environmentalists have not strongly objected to corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is not a green product in any way.

These other biofuels may become viable but clearly they are not viable now, nor the near future. The ridiculous mandates in the new energy bill will only result in boondoggles. The high price of petroleum is all the incentive to develop viable alternative energy sources. The energy bill is just a Soviet style central plan doomed to failure. Bush and other conservatives who supported this bill should hold their heads in shame.