Pete wrote:

>The cost of producing ethanol from corn (like
>it is done in the US) is actually very high. It is very inefficient
>(granted, it will improve over time), and it consumes food crop, so it
>has negative effect on food prices. Ethanol price is
>government-subsidized with tax money that could have been used for other
>purposes (education, healthcare, paying off national debt, etc.). In
>addition, using ethanol-blended gasoline (E85) results in degraded fuel
>economy, so you end up using more of it.
>
>But I do see the benefit of using biofuels to reduce our reliance on
>oil. It's just that currently this benefit comes at a pretty high
>price.

It's ****ing STUPID is what it is. I don't know why were are allowig
the farm lobby to hijack us like this.

I mean, HOW MANY gallons of fuel must be burned to produce the paltry
net-gain of energy at the end?

Here's what Warren Buffet thinks:

"I would say that ethanol is a relatively inefficient way of creating
gasoline--gasoline equivalent, and it uses a lot of energy in the
process of raising the corn that does it. And, as correctly pointed
out, it has a by-product of raising agricultural products elsewhere.
In economics you can never do one thing. Anytime anybody tells you
they're doing something in economics, then you have to say, `And then
what?' And the `and then what' in the case of ethanol is A, if you use
it to plant more corn, you're going to use--in terms of fertilizer and
everything, you're going to use a lot of energy. And secondly, you're
going to raise the prices, on balance, you'll raise the prices of
other agricultural products. So there's no question that that--that's
a fairly correct statement of the problem."