The Ethanol movement is wildly popular for three reasons:
1. The Environmental movement likes it because they have a hate-on for Hydrocarbon companies and would like to see any 'solution' that would remove them from the process. It plays nicely into their 'anti-corporate' agenda. They also romaticize with the 'cottage industry' notion that plants grown by individual farmers would be generating an alternative fuel.
2. Normally conservative rural farmers in the US Mid-West and Canadian prairies are seeing their property values sky-rocket as corn prices and corn futures increase dramatically in price. They don't really care about the environment any more than the next guy but this lines their pockets. They romaticize with an era in which their small-towns were bustling with activity and local people didn't move away to the big city. Ethonal plants give them hope that their dying farm communities will see new life.
3. The politicians that harness these two forces together under one tent. Think of the votes this issue has, it sucessfully combines the left with 'red-state' rural types. A power bonanza in many US States. This third point is what stops any attempt at rational thought that proves that Ethanol from corn in North America is a marginal alternative fuel in both economic terms and as a means of energy storage.
Fact is we use Crude Oil and Natural Gas because no other fuel on earth has as much energy potential and portability. We would reduce many more environmental evils and at a cheaper cost if we as a society plowed all of the money given to the ethanol crowd into making our current energy infrastructure more efficient. Still using fossil fuel, but using much less of it until a better alternative than Ethanol from corn comes around.
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