I don’t know whether our Country’s leaders are dumb or just uninformed, but almost every day I see or read something that makes me think they aren’t “dealing from a full deck”.

Today’s latest, the US government has been buying many millions of dollars of Flex Fuel (E85) vehicles, but don’t have an adequate number of places to refuel them. Flex fuel vehicles can run on gasoline or a mixture of anything from 10% to 85% ethanol. The E85 blend burns cleaner, so this was a way to help Global Warming. As of earlier this month, there were only 1600 places in the US to buy the E85, and most of those were in the states that produce much of the corn that E85 comes from. At this time, CA has less than 25 E85 outlets, but there is a big push in this area to double the number of E85 stations.

The government wanted the car makers to build cleaner cars. The makers have built millions, but they aren’t doing much good without a source of the cleaner burning fuels. I guess the government can’t blame this on the auto manufacturers.

Vehicles running on E85 get considerably less fuel economy than those running on 100% gasoline, so we clean up exhaust emissions by 25%, but you have to burn 25% more fuel to do this. This doesn't compute!! Also, the price of E85 is sometime less than gasoline, but only because of government subsidies.

Other things that should be considered:

• The forest land cleared for the additional corn (or other source of alcohol); allowing trees to grow on the land would have locked up more carbon.

• The huge carbon footprint of the agricultural machinery run to plant and harvest, and to spread chemicals in between.

• The environmental impact of those chemicals themselves, including fertilizers and pesticides necessary for efficient mass-production of the grains used.

• The larger amount of energy required to ship and process the grains and turn them into alcohol, versus the more efficient process of converting oil into gasoline or diesel.

• Even resources such as water, needed in huge amounts for grain production, can have serious environmental impact, including ground water depletion, pollution runoff, and algae blooms from waste runoff.

• The switch to ethanol production has caused corn prices to rise dramatically causing other food products to also rise in price.