Ethanol from Corn II

The large increases in food prices mentioned in the previous post on this subject in Dec. 2007 are very apparent now and getting worse. Milk, eggs, meat and many other foods are sharply up. Also, due to fields being diverted from wheat to corn, bread prices have risen rapidly. Some may say that the high price of gas has a lot to do with these increases. But, while it may have some impact, gas has been high for a couple of years or more without a large effect while the ethanol boondoggle is just really starting to take effect. In the previous post it was mentioned that ethanol cannot be sent through pipelines due to degradation but must be transported by truck. Thus if ethanol were to become widely used another problem would exist. There would be the possibility of accidents and ethanol fires and almost none of the fire departments across the country have the right kind of foam to fight an ethanol fire. They have foam that is for gasoline which is not good for ethanol and water is useless for such a fire. Of course one must remember that even with an extremely large scale production of ethanol, it would only reduce the dependence on foreign oil by about 5% at the most. Part of the governmental support, through legislation, for ethanol is to pander to the almost extreme environmentalist who want ethanol supposedly to reduce CO2. But once more they have not done any in depth thinking of the consequences. Environmentalist almost completely stopped the use of nuclear energy for power generation and, therefore, the incentive to develop better, safer and lower waste producing nuclear energy. The consequence of that was more and more dependence on coal power plants which give off CO2 and other green house gases which provided these same environmentalists with their next great cause. Now, the one after this will be from the pollution of rivers and water from the fertilizers necessary for growing so much corn for ethanol. So in addition to the continuing rapid increases in food prices and fire hazards that cannot be combated effectively, ultimately the ethanol from corn will result in more not less pollution.