I read this excellent commentary about the failures of ethanol in the Washington Post a couple of days ago and I wanted to share it with you.

The authors of the commentary "Ethanol's Failed Promise", Lester Brown, who I have blogged about in the past, is the founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute and Jonathan Lewis who is a climate specialist question the diversion of foodstuffs for the production of biofuels.

An ethanol production plant.

Mandates were orginally meant to move the country toward energy independence and mitigate global climate change, but the authors say there is irrefutable evidence that this policy is not delivering either goal and is actually causing environmental harm and a growing global food crisis.

Here are some of their examples of why they think ethanol is a failed promise......

--Producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy (mostly from coal).
--The production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts.
--Mandates are driving up the cost of agricultural staples.The increased costs of
food are causing shortfalls for worldwide food aid.
--The increased land use for the production of corn means more fertilizer use. The increase
in fertilizer runoff is creating more dead zones in large bodies of water.
--The production of ethanol is creating additional incentives for global deforestation.
--U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation (I'll second that!!!)

--In 2007, the U.S. burned a quarter of it's national corn supply as fuel, and what
did that get us? A whopping 1% reduction in U.S. oil consumption.