See, here's one of my main points. When you describe the corn surplus the way gpsman1 has, it sounds like we have all this free energy sitting around for the taking, and the solution to the energy problem could be easy if we just turn that surplus into ethanol and burn it. And wouldn't we be helping those poor family farms, too?

But the surplus isn't around because a few family farms have a bumper crop. The surplus is around because of a carefully calculated structure of economic incentives that have been put together by lobbyists and legislators, which have carried over for decades, and which mainly benefit a VERY few, huge companies with massive amounts of farmland that they could use for a lot of things besides corn if they wanted to. They don't, of course- they plant and grow all this extra corn, which we don't need, because they get subsidies to do it.

Planting and growing that corn is not costless and it isn't particularly 'green.' If Michael Pollan's figures are right, (that's a half gallon of gas used to produce each bushel), those 900 million extra bushels cost us 450 million gallons of gas. Can you think of a way in which turning 900 million bushels of corn into ethanol can save us more gas than we would save by simply NOT growing that extra corn? Though I haven't run the numbers, it sounds darn unlikely to me. If this explanation is too vitriolic for you, stevejust, then sorry, but the only agenda I have over here is trying to argue for policies and priorities that make the most sense.