I would like to do my own personal boycott of biofuel because even if biofuel is a minor player in food shortages, it makes no sense to me for our gas tanks to be in any competition with people's bellys. This is why I also avoid lawn fertilizer for the same reason.

Everywhere I go, the pump has an ethanol sticker.

Does anyone know where I can get 100% gasoline consistently?

I ride a bike for some of my travel, and drive a 2004 Prius. My next Prius will be a plug in Prius due to come out in 2009. By then, I hope to have either a wind generator or a solar panel or both.

I have a great deal of respect for Treehugger but I'm not sure the heading or content has given this story the readership it deserves.
Maybe, as Treehugger grows in terms of readership and respect it will devote more than 228 words to one of the most important issues of our times.

=== authors' response follows ===
My target here was the US print media which loves to frame every issue is a one-off, and headline it when a public policy (pandering to the Iowa primary voters) has un-contemplated consequences.

I agree with your larger point, though, and had to keep holding myself back from turning this into a major essay. It is only a blog after all.

With the Pope touring the US and of course urging the faithful to skip birth control, it was very hard not to go there.

Using one study to make a sweeping generalisation about GM crops is ridiculous. GM crops are designed to be more efficient and usually require less water and pesticides. In the end they will always be better for the enviroment. It all just sounds like people being scared of something they dont understand. We have heard that all before somewhere...

90% of corn goes to cows.
The mash left from making ethanol is better feed for cows than the corn itself.
Why not look at ethanol as a byproduct of making better feed?
Yeast only makes sugar into alcohol - the rest of the nutrient remain.
This is High School chemistry...

The vast majority of commercialized GM crops are engineered for one thing: resistance to Round Up. Use of this seed allows farmers to dump Round Up on their fields indiscriminately to kill weeds (and of course, it creates a huge market for Round Up). This practice also makes the land pretty much infertile for regular crops, but perhaps more importantly in this context, it creates strong selection pressure for weeds to evolve their own resistance to Round Up. Based on our experience in inadvertently evolving new strains of bacteria that are resistant to all known antibiotics, we should be very wary of taking this path. It's reasonable to predict that in a couple of decades, farmers will face a new host of "superweeds" that can't be killed with herbicides.

There are also some commercial crops with the gene for baccillus thuringiensis (BT) inserted into their genome. BT is a natural bacteria that can be used in organic farming; inserting its genetic material directly into crops is unnecessary at best. All it does is save a little money by eliminating the requirement to apply BT to the fields. The infamous "Starlink" corn was a BT engineered variety that caused allergic reactions in people when it was accidentally introduced into the human food market.

While there has been research on using genetic engineering for increasing yields, that is not where the commercial focus is, so it's not too surprising that GMO crops don't have any better yields.

How about we speed up the process of figuring out how to mass produce ethanol from tall grass, which has been proven to be 540% efficient in labs (including the energy needed to produce it), I'm sure we can dedicate a few thousand acres in the middle of north dakota to supplement most of our oil needs.

I grew up n a farm in the corn belt and I couldn't make a living in the late 70s and early 80s. I went out west and got a job in the oil and gas well service industry, not Haliburton but a smaller company that competes in some of the same service lines. I don't usually respond to anything I read, I would be what someone once called the silent majority.

Reading comments by ignorant Americans that don't know a damn thing about anything except what they read from activists that don't know a damn thing except how to stir up bull crap to Mythg: support their latest cause has driven me to respond this time. Since this is long enough I will try to be blunt.

Myth: The drive to produce ethanol is going to cause world hunger.
Fact: The corn used for ethanol is nothing you would find on the dinner table anyway and if the sugar used in Brazil is a little more expensive maybe it will help curb the need for Americans to go on a diet.

Myth: The nitrogen used to grow corn will lead to even more green house gases.
Fact: There will be no net increase in America at least since all our tillable land was already in production and corn was already a crop planted in a major way. The only difference between then and now is maybe a few more sons will be able to stay on the farm and make a living wage for a change. If you think farming has been all that great for the past 30 years you should quit your job and give it a shot. If nothing else comes from this at least there will be one industry, farming, that remains in this country that can't be exported overtseas.

Myth: The drive for ethanol is primarily to lesson green house gases
Fact: It has nothing to do with it. Its only value is to come up with alternative sources that can be used to lesson our dependence on foreign oil. If it produces twice the green house gases but provides a strategic advantage it is well worth it.

You know, this ethanol strategy is a win win win from my point of view. It makes it possible to make money on American farms. That means the farmer might be able to provide a better rate of pay and provide jobs that are at least as good but hopefully better than Walmart.

The brazilians were always in need of a bail out in the 70s and 80s. Now thery are becoming quite a player in the energy industry. Maybe they will finally live up to their potential.

The combination of this will make it less dependant for farmers to employ illegal aliens. That, demand, like with dope, is what creates the problem in the first place

Ethanol production is contributing to high food prices here and abroad, and starvation in third world countries. If the left is concerned about how the world views us, this energy policy is not gonna help. Even if it is only a small factor, in the eyes of the world the U.S. is taking food off the table of poor people.

If the left is so big on emulating socialst countries why not be like France and start using nuclear energy. Nuclear energy, other renewables like solar(Ive got panels on my roof drastically reducing my electric bill) and more drilling at home are the way our energy policy makers should looking, but there isn't a lobby for those changes.

North American Ethanol production is all about keeping oil dollars at home. Give the money to the farmers, not foreign countries. Using corn to brew ethanol does not make environmental sense. Hopefully we'll soon change this to wild grasses that grow well on poor land and produce much more energy than corn.

Part of the world food problem? Yes, but a small part. In Europe, before ethanol production, farmers were paid each year to keep 10% of their land fallow, to keep crop prices up. With ethanol production, they were allowed to use this land. There are several issues that need to be addressed to make a difference in world food production. Most will have unwanted side consquences.... produce more food...use more water, create more greenhouse gases, produce less food!

Certainly avoiding ethanol all together is not part of the solution.

The author is mostly correct on the first point - that the effect of ethanol on food prices is small compared to the pile up of problems including demand and weather.

As for the article in the Independent, I'm sorry to say that it is full of errors and deliberately twists the data in the original studies. The scientist mentioned in "Exposed" actually wrote a letter about it, but of course no media or blogger covered that. I also went through the Independent article and all of the actual research to find what the scientists actually said, which you can find here: Exposed, Indeed.

I guess it just goes to show that you have to do some research on your own - not trusting reporters to do it for you.

===author's response follows ===
Thank you for the fair minded critique and your research effort. I am sure others will appreciated it as well.

I guess Oxfam is just making up all this stuff about ethanol's contribution to increased worldwide food costs: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7472532.stm

Corn ethanol is frought with problems. It's only apparent advantage is lessing our dependence on fossil fuels. However, as the technology improves we will change over to other more effiecent forms of ethanol such as switch grass or cane, and eventually algee. Unless, of corse, it is killed off as being "evil" before it grows out of it's infancy of corn.

"Ethanol production is contributing to high food prices here and abroad"

Speculation that it's going to cause shortages is contributing to high food prices. So are people flying to safety from real estate to commodities.

House flippers have more to do with starving people in Africa than ethanol does. But, heck, if this gets people off of CORN ethanol, that's fine, since corn isn't a great feed source for ethanol anyway. And if it staves off a biofuel push until industrialized butanol is ready, so much the better.

I did a quick calculation based on corn and other feed production statiistics to supply ethanol in the U.S. The conclusion: we don't have enough acreage in the U.S. just to support our minimum needs. It takes about 11 acres of corn to supply one vehicle for a year's worth of ethanol. We have 240 million registered vehicles in the U.S. which means our farmers require 2.5 billion acres of corn to supply enough enthanol for the year. The size of the U.S. is about 2.4 billion acres, which is slightly less than what is currently needed. We plant annually about 93 million acres of corn which is a drop in the bucket. We are not only faced with this physical limitation, we are also subject to weather conditions as clearly seen with the flooding problem along the Mississippi R. this year. Let's forget ethanol and look to natural gas and coal. Nuclear energy is temporarily on hold until the Yucca Mountain Respository issue is resolved.