Robert Kennedy Jr. recently spoke at a press conference in the Bloomington, Illinios area, and gave his opinions on ethanol production. Kennedy suggests, quite correctly, that it takes too much corn from the food arena to create ethanol fuel from that particular crop, and instead believes that cellulosic ethanol from crops such as switchgrass makes much more sense. Kennedy also said that the actual environmental benefit of ethanol is reduced dramatically because of all the mechanized equipment required to farm the corn. These sentiments were given to area television stations shortly before an address sponsored in part by the Illinois Corn Growers Association.

We have pointed out many times in the past that ethanol has some benefits to fossil fuels, and could even provide a performance benefit if used instead of gasoline, however, the potential of ethanol as a fuel source is limited by the amount of crops available for fuel use. Using corn to create ethanol is rather inefficient, and there are many better choices as a starting crop. I was going to make links out of that entire sentence above, but figured you'd get the picture even if I stopped there.

[Source: Myke Feinman / Grainnet]