Going hungry so the cars keep running

Will ethanol save us from climate change, reduce our dependence on foreign oil (or oil period), and allow us to keep living the exact same way?

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests.

Here's to hoping this story will soon shift from lefty type publications easily dismissed by segments of society and into the Newsweeks of the world. He may be too alarmist for some of you, but James Kunstler has been all over this one for years now.

As a Pennsylvania farmer put it to me in February: "It looks like we're going to burn up the last remaining six inches of Midwest topsoil in our gas-tanks." Friedman's statement also ignores the facts that running cars on ethanol would make no material difference in the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, or that ethanol is 20 percent less efficient than gasoline, meaning we would have to produce and use that much more of the stuff just to stay where we are.

Automakers: We reserve the right to pollute your state

Oh boy. This is rich. Vermont joined a bunch of other states in trying to pass stricter emission standards for new cars starting in 2009. Apparently, the U.S. automakers are pissed that anyone would tell them that they need to build more efficient, less polluting cars. (For the record, only American companies have filed the suit.)

Basically, they think that any standards should be nationwide. But do they really? This is their quote from a lawyer:

"There needs to be a comprehensive multi-sector strategy at the federal level to effectively deal with this issue."

So what they're really saying is "let the federal government deal with it, because we all know there won't be comprehensive federal standards with teeth anytime soon."