Biofuelishness

Submit a schematic of a perpetual motion machine to the Patent and Trademark Office, and they'll reject it. Start a Ponzi scheme, and you'll probably wind up in jail. Call for dramatic increases in ethanol production, and you're a world-healing visionary.

Engineer-Poet explains (again) why ethanol is a fraud, and ends with this devastating observation:

There are benefits from it, but those benefits aren't for you.

The pollution, however, is yours, mine, and ours:

As President Bush promotes ethanol as a green alternative to gasoline, his administration is quietly relaxing environmental rules for dozens of new corn-to-fuel refineries sprouting up across the nation.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is planning to change the way ethanol plants are treated under the Clean Air Act, a move critics say could make it easier for the burgeoning industry to evade controls that dramatically reduce toxic air pollution.

This will be a godsend for ADM, a heavily polluting company whose capacious pockets are the final resting-place of most of the taxpayer dollars that subsidize ethanol production.

The Wall Street Journal notes that "private-equity firms and hedge funds see enormous opportunities" in ethanol. No doubt. And if we legalized three-card monte, there'd be enormous opportunities in that, too...at least until the public realized through bitter experience that this was a game they couldn't win.