And welcome to Swords Crossed, btw.

The move to ethanol is merely to benefit the corporate lobbies and to sound like GWB's government is being "environmental." There's barely a pretense of conforming to any known science, or even that this action is a result of sound policy. Here's what Consumer Reports had to say about the results of their testing of E85 gas:

The fuel economy of the Tahoe dropped 27 percent when running on E85 compared with gasoline, from an already low 14 mpg overall to 10 mpg (rounded to the nearest mpg). This is the lowest fuel mileage we’ve gotten from any vehicle in recent years.

With the retail pump price of E85 averaging $2.91 per gallon in August, according to the Oil Price Information Service, which tracks petroleum and other fuel prices, a 27 percent fuel-economy penalty means drivers would have paid an average of $3.99 for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline.

When we calculated the Tahoe’s driving range, we found that it decreased to about 300 miles on a full tank of E85 compared with about 440 on gasoline. So you have to fill up more often with E85.

The majority of FFVs are large vehicles like the Tahoe that get relatively poor fuel economy even on gasoline. So they will cost you a lot at the pump, no matter which fuel you use. Because E85 is primarily sold in the upper Midwest, most drivers in the country have no access to the fuel, even if they want it. For our Tahoe test, for example, we had to blend our own (see The great E85 fuel hunt).

The FFV surge is being motivated by generous fuel-economy credits that auto-makers get for every FFV they build, even if it never runs on E85. This allows them to pump out more gas-guzzling large SUVs and pickups, which is resulting in the consumption of many times more gallons of gasoline than E85 now replaces.

when did we ever do anything like that...

That's what the capital market is for (venture capital, etc.).

If corn-based ethanol was an economically viable fuel (cheaper per unit of energy delivered), it wouldn't need government subsidies. VCs would see dollar signs and would fund startups; existing players would start new ethanol ventures.

In reality corn-based ethanol is (1) expensive to make, even *with* all the massive government subsidies, and (2) provides lower energy density than gasoline. It *isn't* an economically viable fuel.

Society makes decisions that are not always based upon maximizing financial returns.

That's a highly charitable interpretation of what is going on here with corn-based ethanol.

A more plausible explanation of government policy on corn-based ethanol is that the policy is just plain stupid -- it is imposing massive, unnecessary costs on the vast majority of Americans.

If you want to contribute to the debate then you must accept the reality of the world and figure out how to make it work better

OK, for starters, how about eliminating the tariff we've imposed on foreign providers of ethanol, so that we can buy ethanol from lower-cost providers like Brazil?

[This article] is backed up by no citations or statistics.

Nor is your reply.

You did notice that this article comes from the WSJ opinion section.

The article being published in the country's best business-oriented newspaper is supposed to discredit it somehow? Huh?

I might add that this is no more a classic case of the evils of government intervention than Enron was a classic case of the evils of corporate capitalism. Or maybe both are, and we just need to accept that neither is end-all solution that people on either side believe it to be.

Everything I'm seeing from the progressive camp is pretty hostile to the ethanol thing, by the way.