No. See if we stopped eating we would die. If we stopped burning food, we would have more to eat.
...compared to what the sun put into plant and animal tissues as well as the heat to decompose them and make oil, they’d find a lot less btus gotten out, compared to what went in to make oil.
But the sun is free so it doesn't matter how much went into making the oil. But the coal and oil used to make ethanol has to mined and be paid for.
The whole issue here is that, in a free market, we wouldn't need to do these calculations or have this argument. You could just make the ethanol and offer it on the market. Then you would either make a profit or go broke. We would not have to do all these studies to determine if it was "energy positive" or economical. We wouldn't have to debate it or vote on it because the market becomes the calculator. You either go broke or not.
Lots of people never understand the huge benefit of free markets to achieve much better results than central planners could ever hope to do. It seems that we are always one step away from true disaster brought to us by arrogant, egocentric individuals who “know better.” Let free people participate in an unfettered marketplace and we have cornucopia, don’t and we inherit a downward spiral of shortages, nonsensical allocations, thieves and hoarders, and forceful corruption of society.