[cptacek]

I don't think you can count the water / fertilizer / harvesting cost as one of the sins of ethanol. So, "wholesale destruction of huge tracts of farmland requiring enormous inputs of precious and water and fertilizer which is another lecture in itself" is at the least uninformed, at the most reactionary. The corn etc would have been grown anyway, and new farmland is not being produced...golf courses and city sprawl is guaranteeing that.

And, until the government stops using food as a stick-and-carrot to other countries in the form of embargoes, I think farm prices should be subsidized...if they can't sell to the whole world because of politics, then they should be reimbursed.