(I live in Iowa, so I"m saying this very softly!)

A new study confirms what we've known for quite a while, but farmers are reluctant to admit:  biofuels like ethanol are worse for the environment than gasoline.

We've known for quite a while that they're a boondoggle. Ethanol freezes in pipes, so it must be transported by truck. It's been estimated that it requires a gallon and a half of gasoline to transport the average gallon of ethanol!

But now it seems that corn ethanol is itself more polluting than gasoline is- which raises the obvious question of why we should be producing ethanol in the first place. Well, states which depend on agriculture to a substantial degree have a large economic investment in it, and criticizing it in places like Iowa is not a politically healthy thing to do.