Erik Curren, Augusta Free Press
Have you been infected yet? I mean with ethanol mania?

It's not clear yet whether it started with Midwest corn farmers, hippie do-it-yourselfers or Brazilians who swear that ethanol will soon free them from foreign oil. But now it's spread to Washington and Wall Street, and no political persuasion appears to be immune. President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and the traders at Goldman Sachs have all become ethanol maniacs.

Gates and Goldman are investing big money in ethanol producers. Clinton wants to put ethanol pumps at half of all U.S. gas stations by 2015. And last year's energy bill, supported by Bush, requires refiners to buy a minimum of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol by 2012, which is almost double today's production.

With Peak Oil here and gas prices spiking as world oil supplies begin their long-feared, final decline, supporters say there's a lot to love about ethanol - ethyl alcohol - a liquid biofuel distilled from food crops to replace gasoline. In the U.S., most ethanol is made from corn.

Instead of pumping dollars over to Arab oil sheiks and Al-Qaeda, we help American farmers when we fill up with ethanol. As gas goes up in price, ethanol will be relatively cheaper. Our current cars can already use ethanol in various mixtures with gasoline. Fuel trucks can deliver it, and gas stations can start selling it right away. And best of all, ethanol burns clean, which reduces global warming and local air and water pollution.

"We've got to be aggressive about finding alternative sources of fuel," Bush told the Energy Efficiency Forum in June last year. "And one such source is ethanol. Ethanol comes from corn - and we're pretty good about growing corn here in America, we've got a lot of good corn growers."

Those corn growers are where the politics comes in.

Skeptical of anything that comes from the agricultural lobby - with its uncanny ability to win lavish government subsidies while keeping family farmers dirt poor - vocal critics have denounced ethanol as just another scheme for big corn-producers to feed at the public trough.

...Is ethanol just a scheme by big agribusiness to sell corn and get subsidies, or does it have real potential to make America more energy independent? Can ethanol be made without using so much fossil fuel? Can we make enough of it to replace gasoline and preserve our lifestyle?

Next week, part two: Moonshine over a thousand farms.
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Fill 'er up with corn and politics