Before promoting a bright, new future for ethanol and the companies that produce it, you wish members of Congress had heeded such researchers and some of the other studies and analyses in effect instructing them to strangle the idea and bury it.

They might have noted, for instance, that any excuse for the provisions was nullified by Professor Tad W. Patzek of the University of California-Berkeley. He has shown, one article says, that more fossil fuels are consumed in creating ethanol than the energy the ethanol itself can ever unleash in the nation's automobiles. You get to this conclusion by calculating the energy involved in such operations as making fertilizers for the corn, in wastewater disposal, in transportation and in the processes to convert the corn to a fuel substance, the article notes.

A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- a free-market group to which the United States belongs -- argues that further development of biofuels could have worse environmental effects than producing oil because of "biodiversity loss" and the bad consequences of increased use of fertilizers and pesticides,.

A study by a Stanford University professor, Mark Jacobson, states that ethanol could be more dangerous to human health than gasoline if used in every vehicle in the country, and still another study, this one by Nobel Prize winning scientist Josef Crutzen, argues that biofuel emissions could be a greater global-warming threat than emissions from fossil fuels. Heritage Foundation analysts report that a survey at the recently concluded Bali conference on climate change placed biofuels produced from food at the bottom of a 19-choice list of ways to lower carbon in the atmosphere. Full story....

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