The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained and may go dry in as little as 25 years. It wil ltake a very long time to refill, possibly as much as 5000 years.

Without the aquifer, much of Nebraska, Kanasa, Colorado, and Texas turn into a mini Sahara. The dustbowl of the 30's will be a picnic in comparison.

It is bad, very bad to drain this precious resource for food. To pay farmers with tax dollars to drain it just so that politicians can get corn state votes is fantastically, horrifically bad.

The Colorado River now runs dry before it reaches the Gulf of California. The level of the Great Lakes is dropping. We don't have enough water to go around for our basic needs, let alone to waste it turning food crops into fuel.

Corn-Ethanol as a motor fuel is bad in every way.  Just to examine one of the minor contributors of the problem - fertilizer. When I grow corn, I am only successful with a "side-dressing" of a substantial amount of ammonium nitrate. A fertilizer made in the US via Heterogeneous catalysis which requires a huge amount of natural gas as the methane componet.

It has been suggested, that the huge up spike in natural gas prices that lead to the huge spike in spot electric prices during the summer seasons in the last two years were due solely to increased demand for corn-ethanol.

In addiion, the problem here is that fertilizer prices world-wide experienced a jump, resulting in increased cost of many crops, not just corn, worldwide. Now here in the US your food budget for vegetables may be 1% of your income. In developing countries in may be 70% of your income.

The cruel price we extract from the most vulnerable peoples of the world because we now want to take road trips with more ethanol in our tanks is heart-breaking.

As an aside:

My 80 year old uncle tells me that our family farm went to mechanized agriculture, they got a tractor to replace the mules, because the cost of fuel and purchase price  to run the tractor was less that the acreage of lost production to feed the mules. Granted that was 1930 and they didn't have electricity until 1955, so they were always a bit slow on the uptake.

The point is: do fossil fuels, which don't take away from food production, have an edge over ethanol in that respect?

Those bought and paid for by the oil industry?

The oil industry, and all their millions of $ in lobbying power are pushing for the false "science" of indirect land usage - which is how they calculate Ethanol to be bad for the environment.  But it doesn't pass the smell test at all.

Indirect Land Usage basically states that for every acre of corn we grow in the US, the Brazilians have to burn down an acre of rain forest to grow replacement food.  That is like saying if you eat at a Chinese restaurant tonight - a family in China will go hungry.

Our ability to increase yields for Corn has increased 5 fold just in the last few decades alone.  We are currently using the same amount of land to grow corn as we did in 1940.  No requirement to burn down rain forest.  None.  Zilch.  Zippo. 

Just think about it... Ethanol.  It's Alcohol.  In fact it is the exact same alcohol we drink (in lower concentrations) in beer and wine.  How hazard can something be - that is fit for human consumption?  Now try drinking crude oil.  Have a glass of that tonight instead of beer.

There was an article last month that mentioned there is STILL a mess up at the Exxon Valdese spill.  20 years later – the ecological impact continues. 

We grew all the Corn we needed last year for food, we exported a record amount, we made all the Ethanol we wanted… AND we have a surplus beyond that.  AND corn yields are continuing to increase.

I want to make fuel here – good clean Ethanol.