Biofuels (from anything but the waste stream or possibly algae grown in solar collectors)are a titanic waste of scarce capital that ought to be going into electric cars powered by wind, water, and solar power.  

As well as a waste of the natural world in the form of agribiz monocrop genetically modified pesticide herbicide eco-suicide.

Biofuels still require combustion to yield useful energy.  And infernal combustion vehicles are inherently inefficient.

In a world at war over oil, it is imperative that a viable alternative be produced.  

That alternative is electric battery power, charged up with green power.  These cars are being kept off the market by the present capital allocation monopoly that favors infernal combustion at all costs.

The agribizz biofuel movement is a scam.  It uses oil, coal, and nuclear power to produce huge government subsidies for nothing but a feel good solution.

Nuclear power (from the sun) charging battery powered vehicles through wind, water, and solar power systems is the safe, economical alternative that is needed to end oil wars and global climate disaster.

And since the cost of electric transportation is about one dollar for an equivalent amount of power provided by one gallon of oil or biofuel energy, merely removing the subsidies from fossil fuels and nuclear and applying even a fraction of that wasted capital to kick start this green electric revolution, will have 5 major problem solving effects.

 Jobs.  Manufacturing jobs will return along with the buildout of green energy.  Millions of electric cars, heat pumps, solar and wind installations, and electric vehicles woll need to be manufactured.

 Global climate change from CO2 greenhouse gas due to fossil fuel combustion will be halted.  The costs in terms of storm damage and lost economic growth may be the biggest hidden expense of ALL from fossil fuelishness.  100's of trillions, Katrina's costs are rumored at 2 trillion now?

 The US economy will boom without the endless oil wars and ever increasing oil prices draining effect.  Stable energy prices for decades to come will dispell fear of fear itself and restore investor, consumer, and business confidence.  Fear of terror over oil has a huge negative effect on confidence in the economy.

 Standard of living.  Having ones own solar panels, wind generator, and electric car will be like owning ones own home instead of renting.  Buying increasingly expensive energy from corporate monopolists is like renting and having the rent double every few years, natural gas, heating oil,gasloine, and diesel all doubled in recent years.

And that "rent" money is GONE!  Money invested in solar, wind, and electric vehicles just keeps on yielding higher and higher dividends over the years, restoring the standard of living lost to job outsourcing and soaring transportation and heating and cooling costs.

5.  Quality of life.  All life on planet earth will benefit from an end to the devestation that fossil and nuclear power wreak upon nature.  We are all a part of the natural world, as inseparable as our individual breath from the breath of mother earth.

On the order of 500 million acres may be available for all crops in the whole United States, including current and potential farmlands. Through 2000, the United States was burning more than 128 billion gallons of gasoline annually. Trying to substitute corn-derived ethanol for it all would require dedicating nearly 2.5 billion acres of farmland to corn crops--5 times more land than is now under agricultural production for all purposes. A much more optimistic, but still grossly unrealistic, estimate is 300 to 500 million acres of grassland and forests under cultivation for ethanol to supplant our entire current gasoline consumption, not allowing for growth. Even adding just 10 percent ethanol to gasoline, the farmland needed for growing it would amount to 250 million acres, more than twice the size of California.

Howard Wilshire

Getting ethanol from corn doesn't make any sense. You can make ethanol from any number of materials. We only make ethanol from corn now to 'help' the corn farmers. When we need the corn for other purposes, we can easily make ethanol from other materials. Used newspaper makes excellent ethanol--my husband described a process to do so twenty years ago, but nobody was listening. And it looks as if no one is listening now.

Martha Bartter