Dan Luke wrote:
"180pilot" wrote:

The bottom line is that at the moment producing Ethanol from corn
wastes more energy than it makes according to experts.


I ain't got a dog in this fight, but any time I read a sentence like that,
my bs meter starts to twitch.

What experts? Employed by whom? What are their qualifications? What
peer-reviewed studies did they publish?

Coincidently, yesterday the latest Car and Driver arrived in my mailbox
with a long article summarizing the case against ethanol pretty
succinctly -- it quotes several studies including a meta study done by
the University of California. It might be worth picking one up at
the newsstand if this issue really interests you. I checked their
website, the article isn't up there yet.

One thing I learned is that one reason car makers love E85 is that it
gives them a bonus on the CAFE standards. Only the gasoline that is
burned counts, which means they get to multiply the gas mileage of an
E85 car by 7 (1/0.15)when computing its contribution to fleet average
MPG. This was estimated be with $200 million a year to GM alone.

Damn, everywhere you look with ethanol, there's a subsidy or preference
of some sort involved, isn't there?