"First Wall Street, Then Automakers, Now U.S. Ethanol Industry Wants a Bailout" Green Car Advisor

First Wall Street, Then Automakers, Now U.S. Ethanol Industry Wants a Bailout

"Enough already!"

That ought to be Washington's response to the Renewable Fuels Association's request this month for $1 billion in financial aid to struggling ethanol producers so they can finance current operations.

But wait, there's more. The RFA -- the ethanol industry's lobby -- has also suggested to the incoming administration that it create a $50-billion federal loan guarantee program to finance investment in the ethanol producers' expansion.

And furthermore, the RFA has told Obama & Co. that any automaker that receives federal aid should be required to only produce vehicles that can run on any gas-ethanol blend up to 85 percent ethanol, beginning with the 2010 model season.

Now, if the struggling U.S. ethanol producers were producing cellulosic ethanol, which holds promise as a truly "green" product, that would be one thing. But the struggling ethanol producers the RFA is talking about are, with few exceptions, folks who only produce corn ethanol.

Here's the deal with corn ethanol: So many research papers have been written on how un-green corn ethanol truly is that people who cover green-car news could do nothing but report on those studies and still they wouldn't have time to report on all of them.

Reporting on unfavorable corn-ethanol studies is like covering crime in Los Angeles. Sometimes there are so many fatal drive-by shootings and other unnatural deaths in the County of Angels during an eight-hour shift that a crime reporter simply can't get to them all.

Come to think of it, we reported just this week on a study that concluded that all ethanol-based biofuels are more harmful to humans than fossil fuels.

Yet the RFA seeks a bailout for those struggling corn-ethanol producers. Yes, it's true that the function of ethanol-industry lobbyists is to build support for the industry. But have they no shame?

It isn't as if the domestic ethanol industry doesn't already benefit from generous federal subsidies, a 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, and a federal renewable-fuel standard that sets a minimum amount of ethanol to be blended into gasoline.

But that's not all. An opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal reminds us that the U.S. ethanol industry would not even exist today without the more than $25 billion in taxpayer handouts over the past two decades.

Unfortunately, as the Journal also notes, we shouldn't expect Congress to hear all the bad things that researchers have discovered about corn ethanol and act accordingly.

"Ethanol may never be profitable in the real world, but in Washington it's a lucrative business that provides jobs and votes," the paper said.

That's jobs and votes at taxpayers' expense and at the expense of promising alternative fuels that deserve our hard-earned money much more than corn ethanol ever did.