Ethanol in Gasoline Sucks.

Right now, members of our United States Congress are debating ways to reduce spending. Well, one way is to stop spending our tax money on stupid things. For example, a huge amount of our tax money is spent on corporate welfare to large agribusiness corporations to raise corn, for the purpose of making ethanol to put into our gasoline. By law, ethanol must be blended with gasoline in many areas of the country (e.g., Houston, where I live). As a result, the use of ethanol in gasoline has increased substantially over the past decade, while the cost of food has also increased as a direct result of ethanol consuming ever more of the corn crop.

Making ethanol from corn to put in your gasoline is truly one of the dumbest ideas to come down the pike in generations, and the purpose of this posting is to urge you to write your United States Senators and Representative(s) and tell them to stop wasting our money on such an insane policy.

Currently, the federal government imposes a 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports and provides a 45-cents-per-gallon subsidy for blending it into gasoline. Naturally, the tariff discourages (essentially eliminates) importing ethanol from Brazil, where they make ethanol from sugar cane, which is cheaper than making it from corn. And the subsidy encourages the otherwise uneconomical production of ethanol from domestically grown corn.

The tariff and the subsidy were both extended through 2011 by means of H.R. 4853. President Obama signed the bill into law on December 17, 2010. The items in it that are related to spurring ethanol production from corn to put into our gasoline need to be repealed, and now is the time to do it.

Former Vice president Al Gore, that Nobel-Prize winning, “green energy” activist, has admitted that his support for corn-based ethanol subsidies, while serving as Vice President, had more to do with getting votes in the 2000 Presidential Election than with saving the environment. He also admitted that corn-based ethanol subsidies are not good policy.

At a green energy conference in Athens, Greece, Gore said, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President."

He also stated "It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol. He also said that the energy conversion ratios -- how much energy is produced in the process -- "are at best very small." (As stated below, I believe they are negative.)

Consider the following:

• A gallon of ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy as a gallon of gasoline; hence, your miles per gallon will decrease if you use gasoline containing ethanol.

• Corn is food, after all, so making corn into ethanol for our cars is tantamount to burning up our food, and it is driving up the cost of the remaining food that we have available to eat. Corn is a staple food for cattle, hogs, sheep, and chickens, so the cost of meat and poultry are going up, along with the cost of corn itself. Just a couple of years ago, I could get an ear of corn for ten cents an ear in season, and now the price is about 33 cents. There has also been about a substantial increase in the in the price of Jack Daniels.

• Ethanol loves water and soaks it up from its environment, so it can’t be shipped in long-distance pipelines with gasoline, because the water will corrode the piping and pumping machinery. The ethanol will also dry out the seals at the compressor stations. Consequently, it has to be transported in tank trucks or railroad tank cars, at a higher cost than transporting it by pipeline, and it must be mixed with the gasoline near the market place.

• Corn requires immense amounts of fertilizer, more than any other crop, and the runoff goes into the Mississippi River and runs down to the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey or larger.

• It takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol. This assertion has been disputed by certain studies that have been made, but when you think about all the energy that goes into plowing the land and planting the corn, weeding and watering and spraying the crop while its growing, harvesting the corn, shucking it, stripping the kernels from the cobs, crushing them, distilling the mash, transporting the ethanol, etc., it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine the possibility that you’re putting more into it than you’re getting out of it. I have carefully reviewed several of the studies that have been done out there over the past several years, and in my view, the most thorough and logical studies support my claim that it takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol.

• The only good reason for making corn into ethanol is for whiskey.