This is a blog post about the intersection of a bad idea and
lots of cash–your cash. The bad idea is this: growing crops to
ferment and distill them into ethanol for internal combustion
engines. A few days ago, the EPA revealed that by its
calculations, use of corn-based ethanol will actually raise
greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years compared to
gasoline. And then Friday, Science published a paper by Stanford
academics claiming that it makes much more sense to burn corn to
produce energy for electric cars than it does to convert corn
into ethanol. And it’s not even close. Get this: Bioelectricity
was the clear winner in the transportation-miles-per-acre
comparison, regardless of whether the energy was produced from
corn or from switchgrass, a cellulose-based energy crop. Did you
catch that? “[W]hether the energy was produced from corn or from
switchgrass…” That means that even cellulosic ethanol, which the
industry gas been holding up as a just-around-the-corner panacea
for 20 years, looks like a