The rising price of corn is forcing ethanol plants to close, and plans to build new plants are being postponed. This could cause a shortfall of 5 billion gallons a year which would in turn force the price of gasoline up as well as pushing corn prices down.
We need ethanol and biodiesel. But ethanol is too often produced from corn, and that means using cropland once used to grow food. It can and should be made from other sources like agricultural processing scrap, plants that don’t need farmland like switchgrass, and perhaps most promising of all, from algae.