I'm going to give you Umbrella Principle No. 1: there's no silver bullet.

Really?  Then why spend the money?  In fact, why criticize Bush's vast hydrogen plan?

More phoney DemoLib palaver.

To keep chipping away at the beliefs that seem to be universally held in Congress, that:

Corn ethanol is a first generational fuel and that promoting it "will create an infrastructure of distribution that can be used for cellulosic ethanol."

That infrastructure can be created more quickly than the time we have to wait for cellulosic ethanol to become economic. Blending to 10% does not require a lot of investment in infrastructure.

It [corn ethanol] will create political pressure to require flex-fuel vehicles, so the auto industry will give us cars that burn ethanol or gasoline. It will give us the critical strength to require that the oil and gasoline industry put in E85 pumps at its stations.

Um, yes, a nice tautological justification. But he is assuming that FFVs and E85 are necessarily desirable and worth whatever cost. This is government winner-picking on a grand scale.

It helps build a constituency that can help develop the second generation of ethanol, the one that will have meaningful environmental benefits.

Do people like Vinod Khosla need subsidies for corn ethanol to invest in cellulosic ethanol? Please explain the connection, Mr. Inslee.

Inslee likens corn ethanol to the Wright brothers' flyer. While one can certainly draw a line between that flyer and eventual growth in the aerospace industry, the simile ends there. The Wright brothers had to compete with a lot of other inventors and innovators, and they did it on their own money, not the government's.

And I quote, "Some say that corn ethanol could be a 'stepping stone' to cleaner fuels like cellulosic ethanol. Perhaps. The danger is that the stepping stone becomes the destination--a substitute for meaningful change, squandering precious time and public faith when it doesn't pan out."
-Maywa Montenegro, "The Big Three", 4 Dec. 2006

As Maywa, a Grist writer!, has already pointed out, corn ethanol is bad in two very important ways: it is not very green (GHG, pesticides, etc.), and more importantly, it may kill public faith. The environmental movement is hot stuff right now, but during these next few years it is crucial to show the public that the environment is not only important, but can be managed in a cost-effective, successful manner. Do we, the American people, really have the attention span to keep working on something that doesn't show immediate, positive results?

Inslee had a very mixed message. He spoke about the "Flat Earth Society" being dead, and encouraged us not to think about coal in the "sense of purity." How then, should we think about the environment, Mr. Inslee? After all, why change at all, if not for something significantly better; something--dare I say--pure? You talk about being a leader, and then lead us towards insignificant changes. Clean coal does not exist. You think a "cap-and-trade is more efficient, across all sectors and across all countries"? Haven't scientists and economists already strongly agreed that a carbon tax would be the most efficient?

This man seemed to blow quite a bit of hot smoke. I hope Congress does not like his solutions any more than I do...

I didn't find any reference to hydrogen as an energy source in this article, which is disappointing.  With a simple solar panel generating electrical current, it is possible to separate the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen.  All that is needed then is appropriate infrastructure to generate and store the hydrogen fuel in homes, power stations, and gas stations.  Imagine filling your own pressurized tank of hydrogen right from the panels on your rooftop.  Imagine driving up to a service station and swapping an empty tank for a full one, much as oxygen bottles are swapped today.  
Imagine the energy of American ingenuity and enterprise released to work on this challenge.