Monday's Star

In 2007, when President Bush signed a law requiring oil companies to add billions of corn ethanol to their gasoline each year, he said it would make our country less dependent on foreign oil. Anyone who’d ever grown an ear of corn could have told him then what a bad idea that was. Corn is a very hungry crop. It sucks the life out of the soil where you plant it, and it needs so much fertilizer it’s unlikely to turn much of a profit (which could explain why we paid $2,702,462,268 in corn subsidies last year). Commercial fertilizers are made from petroleum. Petroleum products fuel the tractors that plant and harvest corn, the machines that convert it into ethanol and the vehicles that deliver the finished product. So our push for ethanol may actually be making us more dependent on foreign oil. More tomorrow…