Ethanol--or, how the Dems and Greenies spent billions to do nothing

As almost everyone knows, ethanol is drinking alcohol, and it burns.  A gallon of ethanol produces about 30% percent less heat energy per than a gallon of gasoline.

But because it does burn--and because dumb greenies hate oil and gas with a passion--Democrats and Greenies joined forces to ORDER oil companies to buy billions of gallons of ethanol and "blend" it into the gas you buy.  That's why every gas pump you see carries the sticker "Contains up to ten percent ethanol."

So like magic, they passed LAWS ordering this--and patted themselves on the back, positively glowing with virtue.

Problem is, before the shitheads passed the law it was well known that the cost of a gallon of ethanol (made by letting yeast turn corn syrup into alcohol, then using huge amounts of heat to distill the mash into ethanol) was WAY more than the cost of a gallon of plain gasoline. 

Of course the Greenies and Dems knew this, and knew that voters would revolt if they had to pay more at the pump than they'd been paying before the LAW that gasoline be adulterated with ethanol passed, eh?  But nevah fear, citizen: duh Dems knew how to hide that price increase from dumb voters!  

Yes, citizen, the Democrats knew that through the magic of undecipherable 2,000-page laws that no one ever reads, they could order oil companies to buy billions of gallons of far more expensive ethanol without making the price of gasoline go up! 

See, when you run congress you can hide shit like this.  The answer?  They quietly wrote into their shitty LAW that the EPA would use your tax dollars to pay refining companies to offset the higher cost of the ethanol the Dems ORDERED the companies to buy.  For those unfamiliar with the term, that's called a "subsidy," and in the 1980s and 1990s the gummint paid billions of dollars in these subsidies.

So by the gummint quietly using tax dollars to pay the difference, drivers/voters didn't see any increase!  Is that cunning or WHAT?  But today, with higher oil prices, blended gas is actually bit less expensive than pure gasoline.  So at least there's that, eh?

WAIT...it gets better!  Obviously corn can be used to feed people or livestock--or used to make ethanol, by law.  Turns out 35 to 40% of all U.S. corn production is used for ethanol--which obviously means it's not available for food.  And following the well-known (but not by Democrats) laws of supply and demand, that makes the world price of corn go up a bit. 

Dem/Greenie: "Dat okay, citizen!  World price only go up a tiny bit, an' since we gibs ouah corn to po' third-world nations anyway, it don' mattah much."

Okay Greenies, you got us there.  Then consider that water is getting more scarce in the southwest U.S.  So how much water does it take to make a gallon of ethanol compared to gasoline?

Of course the average Green/Dem hasn't a clue, cuz dey don' doo no research, an' dere masters don' tell 'em...cuz it turns out making a gallon of corn ethanol requires about 990 gallons of water, compared to 5.6 gallons for a gallon of gasoline.

Dem/Greenie: "Uh...wuh...I...uh...Okay, we'll only make dat faaabulous ethanol in the midwest, not in the dry southwest!  Yeh, dat's it!"

See how neatly they pivot, citizen?

Finally: the amount of energy in ethanol is far less than the energy needed to produce it: To produce a thousand liters of ethanol requires about 9.9 million kcal, nearly double ethanol's energy yield of 5.1 million kcal.  [Pimentel et al., 1996] 

In other words, ethanol is a net loss, in both energy and food.  But you can't do shit about it now, cuz BOTH the Democrats and the conservative corn-growing states love the stuff.

Ain't congress great?  And when the Dems win back total control of duh gummint, they're gonna tax oil and gas like crazy, "to save duh Erf!"  Yay!