Understory: the Official Blog of RAN

Los Angeles Times: Drunk on Ethanol

An editorial in Sunday’s edition of The Los Angeles Times provides a sobering examination of the widely-touted ethanol solution to our oil addiction.

The Times does a great job of laying out the tremendous ecological and economic costs associated with large-scale ethanol production (including a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined) as well as its limited capacity of satisfying our growing appetite for food and fuel. While cutting through many of the shortfalls ethanol proponents are using to tout this alternative, it becomes clear the level of insanity brewing from the lobbyist-infested halls of our Capitol.

“The ethanol craze, like so much of U.S. energy policy, is designed more to please small but politically powerful constituencies such as corn growers and Detroit automakers than to solve the nation’s energy problems.”

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