Question:
Drunk on Ethanol Our addiction to corn-derived alcohol is not only costing us a lot of money, it's also wiping out fish and wildlife habitat, and polluting our air, soil, and water. By Ted Williams

The question was: Who would spend 10 cents to 20 cents more per gallon for gasoline that reduces mileage, degrades your car, destroys fish and wildlife, increases air pollution, and makes the United States more dependent on foreign oil?

Answer: Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), and other politicians from the Corn Belt who had pushed this "reformulated- gasoline program" were ecstatic. The amendments created a new future for the corn-produced oxygenate ethanol (a.k.a. "white lightning" or grain alcohol), which hadn't found a decent market for anything save drinking despite $5 billion in federal subsidies. With the mandated use of "gasohol" (one part ethanol, nine parts gasoline), the moribund ethanol industry would spring heel-clicking from its wheelchair.

Agribusiness would prosper. And America would get cleaner air and homegrown energy. It was going to be a win-win-win-win.

Fourteen years later there are 78 ethanol plants in 19 states. More than half are being expanded, and scores of new ones will soon come online. Fully 10 percent of all corn grown in the United States goes into ethanol. And Senator Daschle, Representative Dennis Hastert (R- IL), and President George W. Bush have been trying to legislate a mandate requiring states to increase the amount of ethanol used in reformulated gasoline from about 3 billion gallons to 5 billion gallons by 2012.

But the reformulated-gasoline program has turned out to be a colossal failure, and the ethanol industry has transmogrified into a sacrosanct, pork-swilling behemoth that gets bigger and hungrier with each feeding. 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 water. Of all crops grown in the United States, corn demands the most massive fixes of herbicides, insecticides, and chemical fertilizers, while creating the most soil erosion.