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• Q: We're talking about corn. Like corn you eat in the summer?
• A: Not really. That's sweet corn. And it actually makes up only a small percentage of the corn grown in America. Historically, the overwhelming majority of corn grown in America goes toward livestock feed. In the mid-to-late 1990s, about 75 percent of corn went to livestock. Following the ethanol mandate, more corn has been planted and more of it is going to fuel. According to the Department of Agriculture, which has been tracking this for decades, 2010 was the first year on record in which more corn went to fuel than to livestock feed. That was true again in 2011 and 2012. This year, about 43 percent of corn went to fuel and 45 percent to livestock feed.
• The ethanol industry argues those figures are misleading because the distillation process leaves behind a residual byproduct that can be used for livestock feed. That byproduct is not measured in the official government data. But however you run the numbers, it's true that more corn is going toward ethanol.
• Q: You don't hear a lot about this.
• A: Maybe because green is definitely a hot color: Green energy, green jobs, the green economy. But the truth is all energy has costs associated with it.
• Everyone knows the environmental cost of oil and natural gas. But the Obama administration rarely acknowledges that its green initiatives have costs, too. And the government allows green companies to do not-so-green things. For wind power, that means the government looks the other way as turbines kill eagles in violation of federal law. For ethanol, the government accepts the environmental consequences in hopes the industry will develop cleaner next-generation biofuels.
• Q: So bottom line, is ethanol better for the environment than oil?
• A: It depends how you define "better." Burning ethanol releases less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than burning gasoline. There's no big worry about ethanol spills that might pollute the ocean or kill wildlife. And some ethanol replaced MTBE, the toxic gasoline additive that was terrible for water pollution.
• But when you factor in land conversion -- and the erosion, pollution and greenhouse gases that come with it -- ethanol doesn't look as good. Independent scientists say it's tough to make a case for ethanol as long as farmers are plowing over virgin prairie and conservation land. That's why ethanol industry executives don't always factor those effects into their calculations when they say their product is far cleaner than oil.
• Trying to determine the effects of one policy in an interconnected global economy is hard enough. Figuring out the environmental effects of that policy is even more complicated. So scientists usually rely on economic and environmental models

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