Ethanol scam?

There is a good article in Rolling Stone about [tag]ethanol[/tag].
They examine the whole ethanol policy and agribusiness connections with our politicians. I think it is a good read.

The great danger of confronting peak oil and [tag]global warming[/tag] isn’t that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after “solutions” that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America’s future is going to be powered by [tag-tec]biofuels[/tag-tec], mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, “Everything about ethanol is good, good, good.”

My feeling is that [tag-ice]ethanol[/tag-ice] is great for a small impact alternative fuel or blended fuel but we sure cannot go the way of turning our corn crops into ethanol and think we are going to save the country from the evil foreign oil.

Rolling Stone’s bottom line take:

In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America’s blind faith that technology will solve all our problems.