“All that glitters is not ethanol”

It turns out that the “natural liquid savior” to fuel conservation and the worlds environmental calamity is not the “cure all” everyone hoped it would be.

According to recent studies, farmers are wiping out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies.

Some billions of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides are sprayed on the plants and it is getting into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive.

In 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Mr. Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”

5 Million acres of land set aside for conservation – more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined – have vanished on Mr. Obama’s watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

More and more environmentalists are calling the use of ethanol as a fuel substitute a total environmental disaster.

Not only is the gas substitute bad for the environment it is also harmful to the vehicle engines that are burning it. The only people that are benefiting from its use is a small minority of corn growers and ethanol producers; for the consumers and the environment corn ethanol turned out to be a dud.

On the economic side of the “coin or corn” it requires billions of dollars from US taxpayers to keep this fuel initiative going; beside raising fuel and food prices for consumers.

Just like every-other mistake the government makes, for now they are sticking by its new source of fuel. When so much hype and money is “pumped” into a project and it goes haywire just like Obama-Care did, everyone in DC (Designers of Chaos) starts running for the fire escape like a Chinese fire-drill; only after they have lunch.

It will probably be 10 more years before anyone has the initiative to admit that the ethanol idea was a big mistake. By the time that happens it will have destroyed millions of car engines, billions of acres of land and trillions of taxpayers’ dollars.

Their intentions may have been good but the outcome wasn’t.

The power brokers in DC still have not learned a basic fundamental of life. If you make a mistake, admit it and march on, don’t continue to defend it and go down with the sinking ship.