The ethanol hoax

For the regulars at TRR, you already know that the ethanol hysteria sweeping the country like a swamp fever, is based on pure dementia in the minds of zealots in the church of modern environmentalism. President Bush, other PC republicans, and most democrats are on board with the idea that somehow ethanol will save the planet from the imaginary menace of global climate change.....it won't. For you believers in ethanol, a column was written by brilliant economist Walter Williams detailing the idiocy of putting our food in our gas tanks rather than in our bellies. Here's an exerpt you must read...

Ethanol contains water that distillation cannot remove. As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol. The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge. These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines.

Ethanol is 20 to 30 percent less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile. It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank. That's enough corn to feed one person for a year. Plus, it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel -- oil and natural gas -- to produce one gallon of ethanol. After all, corn must be grown, fertilized, harvested and trucked to ethanol producers -- all of which are fuel-using activities. And, it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. On top of all this, if our total annual corn output were put to ethanol production, it would reduce gasoline consumption by 10 or 12 percent.

Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn't make it in a free market. That's why Congress has enacted major ethanol subsidies, about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is no less than a tax on consumers.

Everybody points to Brazil's ethanol-based fuel economy as the model to follow, but Brazil's ethanol is produced from sugar cane which is much more efficient as a fuel and much cheaper to produce. This is why ethanol is profitable in the marketplace in Brazil, and it's an utter failure in the American free market. If corn-ethanol fuel was worth a damn, Bush wouldn't have to employ the power of the federal government to mandate it's use. Any time the imperial federal government mandates something, you can bet it would be a colossal failure on it's own...and you should stay away from it, both from a use and an investment standpoint.

If after reading this, you still stupidly believe that corn-ethanol is good for the environment, the economy, water conservation, rain forest preservation, world hunger, etc....then you should not be allowed to breed.

Hat tip to TownHall.