[GTAHVIT]

Lets not forget that there are millions of acres of farmland in the US being subsidised by the government so the farmers won't grow corn. If they got rid of the subsidy then that land can be used to produce Ethanol... Which by the way I think would be a mistake. I don't think Corn Based ethanol is the way to go. But now we can produce it from sugar, trees, and cellulosic sources which are all much more efficient and with far less of an impact to the environment then corn based ethanol has.

Cellulosic Ethanol requirements are no less mind boggling then corn based when you consider how much energy goes into creating ethanol from corn. Cellulosic ethanol is far less wasteful and has no impact on crops and has very little impact when compared to the slash and burn crops in Brazil. If you want to say Brazil is jacked up then so be it. But ethanol, on the whole, when you consider the many better sources, isn't as bad as you say it is.

Also, Sugar is the most readily available feed stock in the world. No one is proposing that we should use every spare piece of land to grow/store the materials necessary to create ethanol. But, Ethanol is the best substitute for foreign oil. It will work with the current infrastructure and only requires minor modifications to cars to make it work with any mixture of gasoline. Nothing other than MAYBE hydrogen can be easily adapted to the current vehicles on the road today. We at least have to give it consideration. Otherwise we are left with crude oil and all the global and environmental baggage that comes with it. I say we use Ethanol to at least decrease our dependency on OPEC, and, at least, partially reduce the cost of a gallon of gas.

There is more to gain than moving to a renewable fuel source. Ethanol also allows us to move away from 40yr old refineries, and the "stick it to the U.S. mentality OPEC has. For the sake of competition alone, Ethanol production is valuable to the U.S. If a significant portion of our fuel requirements can be supplied by ethanol there will be less demand for crude oil and lower prices at the pump.