The problems with ethanol are many, the biggest is that it takes approximately 27% more energy to produce ethanol than the ethanol will produce when burned. I'm waiting for the people that want to punish the oil companies with a windfall profits tax to discover that farmers are going to make big bucks on this and put a windfall profits tax on farmers (think I'm kidding?).
What bugs me is that we have documented U.S. oil fields containing enough oil to meet current demand for 250 years, 94% of which is off limits for some sort of enviromental reason or another----not counting reserves discovered last year in the Gulf of Mexico that Cuba will soon be drilling in. It also hurts us that it takes 20 years of permits and hearings to begin to build a new oil refinery in the U.S. Yeah I read about the increased output of the sun, they have even documented increased temps on other planets in our solar system---didn't know our earthly pollution extended to Mars. Yet with all this concern about the environment, all tree huggers can thing of to do with the most fuel efficient mode of transport (trains) is to turn their tracks into bike trails.