Question:
Ethanol dirties the air more than it cleans it. Its production requires vast plantings of corn, which wipe out fish and wildlife by destroying habitat and polluting air, soil, and waterin detail?

Answer: For one thing, if you drink it, you'll suffer lots more than a hangover. While it's by no means the most toxic of fossil fuel derivatives, it's among the worst smelling and tasting, and it penetrates farther and hangs around longer than most any other. Still, by marketing MTBE, the oil and gas industry performed an important public service. MTBE's vile taste and odor in tap water alerted the nation to the deplorable, porous condition of underground gasoline storage tanks, which were leaking into aquifers. To hear Corn Belt politicians and ethanol manufacturers talk, you'd think their single overriding concern is safe drinking water for California, the Northeast, and other places where MTBE gets mixed with gasoline. "MTBE has contaminated groundwater in 43 states and is considered by public health experts to present a risk of cancer in humans," proclaims Senator Daschle. "It is estimated that there are at least 150,000 MTBE-contaminated sites nationwide." But America doesn't have an MTBE problem so much as it has a leaky-gas-tank problem. And since the MTBE panic of the late 1990s, there has been progress in fixing the tanks.

"Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning."