HAVE A GREAT SATURDAY READERS!

Don't forget readers that our unbeaten and #1 ranked LSU Tigers kick off at 2:30 pm on yet another national TV audience in "Death Valley" against the Auburn Tigers.

Here is a rather interesting article about ethanol, suggesting that ethanol is leading our Country down the wrong path.........this article supports just about everything I've been saying and predicting on my website. Here's the article:

Ethanol is taking us down the wrong road

By: PRANAB DAS | Guest columnist
Published: October 21, 2011

"Child starves because mother drives to gas station" sounds like a headline from a grocery-store tabloid. But strangely, it could be true. Today we are using about 40 percent of America's corn, an essential food and feed crop, to make ethanol. Federal law requires that ethanol be mixed in with gasoline. So we are all driving around burning corn instead of eating it.

What's worse, one day's food for an average human being contains about the same amount of energy required to get to the gas station and back home again. So, even if we could perfectly convert the energy from corn to motor fuel, you couldn't even drive a couple of miles on the corn it would take to feed a person for a whole day. Commuting to and from Greensboro would be like taking dozens of people's food off the table.

It seems absurd to squander so much food for so little transportation. How did we come to make such perverse use of our most precious resource? The answer depends, of course, on whom you ask. Some cite politics and the Iowa caucuses, others the powerful farm lobby. The fact that environmentalists naively embraced biofuels before fully understanding their costs was certainly a factor. Whatever the reason, we've been at it for years.

America began making corn into fuel on a massive scale in times of surplus. Farmers couldn't sell their harvests, and grain silos were bulging across America's heartland. Meanwhile, America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil continued to embroil us in nastiness abroad. Enter ethanol. We could use up that surplus, keep the tractors humming and make a dent in our oil consumption. Maybe, if we were lucky, we might even help the environment. Win, win, win.

Alas, what seemed like a good idea has gone horribly wrong. The global food surplus evaporated, and the balance tipped back to shortage. Food prices worldwide have shot up, and domestic corn prices have nearly tripled in the past five years. This has had profound effects up and down the economic ladder, many of which are felt close to home.

For example, this past July, Omtron stopped production at two large North Carolina poultry plants because feed prices had skyrocketed. With a barrel of corn now costing almost $7, the plants are too expensive to run, and hundreds of workers have lost their jobs.

Other effects are more subtle but also more pervasive. American food prices (conveniently eliminated from the "core" inflation rate most often quoted by the media) are climbing. In August, the year-over-year price increases for meat, dairy and eggs were all about 10 percent, according to the USDA — 10 percent in a year when incomes are falling and the economy stagnates!

Three government policies that support food-to-gas conversion were just awful ideas and should be reversed. First of all, we give a direct subsidy to ethanol producers for every gallon they make. U.S. taxpayers paid more than $6 billion in subsidies last year and are on pace to spend even more in 2011. Second, we impose a tariff on foreign ethanol (such as the Brazilian stuff made more cheaply from sugar cane) of 54 cents per gallon. This further skews the market and increases corn prices.

Most important, the federal government imposes a mandate requiring that an increasing portion of our national fuel supply come from corn. Even if the subsidies expire as scheduled at the end of this year, the mandate will remain, effectively forcing every consumer to subsidize the conversion of food to fuel.

Perhaps most dismaying is the fact that biofuels might not even be good for the environment. While the chemical energy in corn comes from sunlight, so much power goes into the fertilizers, harvesters, transports and infrastructure to grow it that many analysts believe corn-based ethanol is an environmental loser overall.

We live in challenging times and everyone would like to make the world better and the economy more sustainable. Unfortunately, our good intentions have paved a road from the corn fields, and we're burning our way down it. Straight to you-know-where.

Pranab Das is a professor of physics at Elon University, where he teaches a course on energy and the environment. He lives in Winston-Salem. The Journal welcomes original submissions for guest columns on local, regional and statewide topics. Essay length should not exceed 750 words. The writer should have some authority for writing about his or her subject. Our e-mail address is: Letters@wsjournal.com. Essays may also be mailed to: The Readers' Forum, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. Please include your name and address and a daytime telephone number.

"Pete" Landry........comments welcome at ...........way2gopete@yahoo.com