Food for fuel is immoral. Anyone that advocates ethanol advocates the inefficient production of fuel that takes food off of the shelves of the world's grocery store. In turn, it drives up corn prices by restricting the supply and creating additional market competition. Advocating ethanol is advocating fuel over life.

I think it is political "sand in the eyes".If we believe the media which is corporate run than all ,or most of what is said is lies.

It's true. Half of the world would starve if bioengineering wasn't already helping....believe it or not....

Sand in the eyes. Do the research.

Ethanol is a very poor fuel. It's energy ratio is only 1.3-1.5 depending on the process. What that means is that it has a .3-.5 net energy benefit above the amount of energy it takes to process it. These are the USDA's numbers for the USA. Ethanol made from Sugarcane in Brazil has a net energy ratio of 8 by comparison. These do not factor in "hidden" costs of ethanol production. Water is one of them. Ethanol plants require huge amounts of water (1 gallon of ethanol requires 4.5 gallons of water) for their processing applications, not to mention the amount of water irrigated onto the crops to make them grow. This potable fresh water problem is nothing to balk at because the main Ogalala ground aquifers...which crosses many of the USA's "bread basket" midwest states is a "Fossil" non-replenishing aquifer. Once its gone, its gone. The more water use, the more likely it is that ground water will run out...possibly soon. Another hidden cost is fertilizer. Most of the farmland under cultivation in the USA is done so with huge "factory" farms that don't bother with crop rotation and instead use high potency fertilizers and pesticides. In fact, topsoil depletion is so bad that if no fertilizer were to be placed in a large portion of midwest soils, very little would be able to grow there anymore, naturally. This would lead to a dust-bowl effect - or rapid soil erosion. Fertilizers and Pesticides also have a hidden cost of being made, primarily, from petroleum derivatives and byproducts. Meaning, we spray those crops with petroleum. Another hidden cost is arable land. By putting pressure on a world-wide bio-fuels program, most land is going to be pressed into agricultural service. This is already happening in the Amazon where thousands of hectares are being plowed so that Brazil can expand its energy supply. We use petroleum to grow the crops, we use petroleum to process the crops and the net energy benefit is 30-50% above initial input; is it worth the risk? Well, the risk is not that we're going to "run out" of food. Civilization has always had plenty - we've generated excess supply of food on average for the past 10,000 years or so. That's how our population keeps growing - if we didn't have extra food, there could not be extra people. The risk is that depleting the food supply causes inflation in the cost of food. It's not that there isn't enough, its that supply and demand dictate that the cost of the food is suddenly beyond the means of many of the people in the developing world who rely on it. If you're reading this right now, on the Internet, you're not one of the people that is going to be effected by it. The people at greatest risk are the poorest people who live on a tenuous survival margin. If you make $0.15 a day and bread prices double from $0.10 to $0.20, suddenly you're starving.

Stupidity. The idea of biodiesel is that you make it yourself, or get it from a restaurant or fish and chips shop or something, you don't kick poor people off their land to grow it. It's a corporate solution to an environmental problem, and corporations don't know crap about the environment, they only care about profit.