Interviewed in The Independent, Earth Policy Institute President Lester Brown realizes what’s at stake with the current fuel ethanol obsession:

Cars are a new concern, the worry arising from the present drive to produce green fuels to fight global warming. A “corn rush” has erupted in the United States, using the crop to produce the biofuel, ethanol – strongly supported by subsidies from the Bush administration to divert criticism of its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 – mostly poor – countries.
From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state’s crop.
This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers. Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they simply cannot afford to do so.

A colleague of mine who has followed Brown’s utterances for many years suggests that this “may be the first time he’s ever been right about anything.” Yet he is certainly correct here. Corn ethanol is a boondoggle of gigantic proportions, foisted on the American public by an uncompetitive corn ethanol industry that sees the global warming scare as its lifeline. And this boondoggle harms the world’s poor, not just working Americans who have to pay more for gas. A responsible Congress would cut the ethanol mandate and subsidy to nothing.