A brand new ethanol plant opened today in Adrian that will produce 100 million gallons annually. Sounds good, right? Not really. Although ethanol may be a quick fix for a percentage of our oil use, it is a program that falls pitifully short and is even dangerous. Think about this. Right now we only produce ethanol equal to 3.5 percent of what we consume in gasoline. This little bit of ethanol production is using up 20 percent of our entire corn crop in the states already. We will never be able to produce enough ethanol! The price of corn has already doubled. On top of that Third World countries are going to face starvation for sure if corn becomes our new oil. If we proceed with this massive corn production, where is the land needed for other crops? We’ve had massive fires across 11 states, devastating more than just forested areas. Our urban sprawl went unchecked for almost a decade. Now we have thousands of homes across the country in those newly sprouted subdivisions standing empty in foreclosure. Many of those subdivisions were once farmland.   And now no one wants to eat Chinese imported food and are paying attention to what they eat and where it comes from. I see a big mess over our food in the near future. I’m already buying new canning utensils and our garden will probably get bigger next year. It may get down to feed yourself if you want safe food, because the U.S. simply does not have the landmass to produce food staples and all this bio-fuel. Even if we could produce our own food, if the heat waves continue to get worse, our fields will simply fry. Then what?  Who is in charge of this fiasco? Congress, specifically the Senate, who just recently mandated we produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. This is frightening. Someone do the math. This does not solve the energy crisis by any means. The government is paying out $51 billion in subsidies for corn, which amounts to $1.38 per gallon, almost half of ethanol’s wholesale market price. This is very bad business sense. Ethanol is nothing but 180 proof pure grain alcohol that is denatured so we can’t get drunk on it. Other things than corn, like sugar cane and switch grass, can make pure grain alcohol also. Cars can’t run on the stuff in its pure form so what we get at the pumps is E85, 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. An article in Rolling Stone further said that the density of ethanol is 1/3 less than gasoline, so there is less bang for a tank full of ethanol. Cars will certainly burn more ethanol than gas to go as fast. We will never be able to produce enough ethanol. The article went on to say that ethanol is not all equal. Brazil is already ahead of the U.S. on ethanol production because they use sugar cane which puts out higher energy levels than the amount of fossil fuel used to grow, irrigate, fertilize, transport and refine it. Brazil’s sugar cane ethanol is 8 to 1, energy output versus energy used. It is better than gasoline at 5 to 1. Know what corn’s output to input is–1.3 to 1 or even 1 to 1. that renders it useless because we are using as much energy or fossil fuels (gas, oil, coal) to produce the stuff! So we have ethanol barons rising out of a foreign country to outperform us as the rich Arabs do with their oil. We’re not winning this race for ethanol already. There is a major company, every bit as greedy as big oil, pushing this stupid, stupid, costly move—Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness giant. Read more about this misleading mess at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15635751/ethanol_scam_ethanol_hurts_the_environment_and_is_one_of_americas_biggest_political_boondoggles. It seems every time we turn around, there is a huge conglomerate pushing their weight around to the demise of the middle class citizens of the U.S. Lately we’ve been duped about the food we eat, and the goods we buy. It doesn’t seem that anyone is really looking out for us anymore.  And no one seems to be looking out for the number one thing we need first and foremost, our environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Without any of those things, the economy is of no consequence. We’ll be busy scrounging for food and water instead of a job.