Reading David’s first three reasons against corn there are many good points being made.  Corn cannot save us from using Fossil Fuels and it is very labor intensive, from my understanding, to make.  But, that does not mean we should stop running it because some cars run better on E85 than they do on gas.  However most cars have to be tuned to take this type of fuel.  Turbocharged cars actually run better on E85. So that 5 Billion gallons of Ethanol that was produced would actually be doing it’s purpose to the 1%.  Ethanol is expensive and labor intensive to make so says cornell.  They stated that from the energy of 1 gallon of ethanol 40% of that energy is used to make that gallon.  This is not practical Mr. Pimentel is right.  But for the right use and the right application it is still feasible to make, if you can afford to buy it that is.

Cellulosic Ethanol is not widely used and I don’t believe there’s not really practical use for it with how expensive it is to make.  It takes about 70% more energy to make this.  This is also not very practical with how much food we consume on a daily basis in the united states.  The price of corn is going up because of how much corn is used to make our food and to feed livestock along with ethanol production.  While ethanol may be a nice luxury it takes 22 lbs of corn to make 1 gallons  of ethanol.  Thats a lot of corn when you consider we made 5 billion gallons last year.

References:

http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/77025:david-pimentel–corn-cant-save-us