Re: Pawlenty. Wow.
Has anyone actually sat down and calculated the energy budget (not just the economic tradeoffs) for ethanol? It takes energy to grow crops, lots of it. Fertilizer, chemicals, farm machinery, irrigation, silage drying and storage, transport, processing and refining, and finally, distribution and marketing; I wouldn't be surprised if we needed more fossil fuel energy to make biofuel than we got out of it when we burned it.
Fermenting agricultural wastes like the Brazilians do makes sense, but this biofuels thing is lunacy. Are politicians (and farmers) so conscienceless that they simply don't care? Surely, they've done the math.