California to dump ethanol?

By Ralph Alter

As greenies nationwide continue their mental gymnastics searching for alternative energy sources, it seems the California EPA is falling out of love with ethanol:

California regulators are ready to conclude that corn ethanol cannot help the state fight global warming. It seems they've discovered putting food in our cars would destroy the earth in order to save it.

Once again the Law of Unintended Consequences is catching up to liberal orthodoxy, revealing another dead-end in the search for an alternative to drilling here and drilling now. Among other flaws belatedly discovered with by the state's Enthusiastic Prius Association are:

1.) "ethanol yields about 30% less energy per gallon of gasoline, so miles per gallon in internal combustion engines drop significantly."
2.) Converting ground to corn growth damages the land and increases agricultural runoff.
3.) Burning ethanol increases global warming ( it "releases nitrous oxide as well as CO2, which is said to trap heat at a rate 300 times more than an equivalent amount of CO2.")
4.) Converting corn for food to corn for fuel raises food prices ("Higher use of ethanol accounted for up to 15% of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008.")

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Perhaps if the Sierra Club and Greenpeace would remove their boots from the necks of liberal legislatures our state and federal governments might awaken to the fact that we have ample energy resources readily available to us right here, right now. The sooner we start drilling for our own oil and resuming the development of nuclear energy the sooner the greenies and their elected proxies can quit tilting at windmills of fantasy alternative energies

Ralph Alter blogs at Right on Target.