It’s an odd feeling to be cheering Sarah Steelman for doing the right thing. (Though I still have a wary eye out for an ulterior motive in her announcement that she has changed her mind about the ethanol mandate in Missouri.) She now opposes it.

Missouri requires that 10 percent of all gasoline be ethanol, and Steelman chose “a busy Springfield street side for her announcement that ‘within 100 days of being elected Governor, I will do everything in my power to repeal the ethanol mandate in Missouri.'”

She opposes the mandate because “it has produced higher food prices and higher costs for farmers since going into effect January 1.”

The Missouri Corngrowers Association, predictably, disagrees, but let me just say, before I present their side of it, that Mark Twain’s observation is particularly apt here: “Tell me where a man gets his corn pone, and I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” Anyway, here’s the corn growers’ spin:

“Removing the ethanol requirement in Missouri would only increase prices at the pump for already hurting consumers.”

The corngrowers tell us that using ethanol will save Missourians $285 million this year and over $2 billion over the next ten years.

Not so fast, says Steelman:

But Steelman said Tuesday that ethanol doesn’t make traveling any cheaper for drivers. “You don’t get as many miles per gallon burning the blend, the ethanol blend, as you do regular gas. So that if you’re not getting as many miles per gallon, you have to fill up more often at $4 a gallon,” the State Treasurer said.

Marshall [the Corngrowers Association CEO] pointed to a recent analysis by Merrill Lynch that shows that gasoline prices would be 10 to 15 percent higher without the ethanol supply in the marketplace. That translates into ethanol helping hold down gasoline costs to American drivers by 60 to 70 cents per gallon.

60 to 70 cents per gallon sounds impressive, until you hear what another right wing source, Show Me Institute, has to say. It points out that the ethanol industry is subsidized by taxpayers, so not only is Missouri gas not as cheap as it looks on the gas pump monitor, but diverting corn for use as fuel is driving food prices up. The Show Me Institute predicts the opposite of what the corngrowers are telling us: to wit, that ethanol use will cost Missouri consumers a billion dollars over the next decade.

Missourians don’t realize what our cheaper gas is really costing us: more students in every classroom, for example. We taxpayers put the money that should have gone to repair our roads into ethanol plants. Without subsidies, nobody would use the stuff because it’s expensive to produce. It needs huge quantities of nitrogen fertilizer (made from natural gas) as well as petroleum-based pesticides. So ethanol is not only not cheaper than using oil, but producing it uses oil anyway. Furthermore the runoff from the pesticides poisons our groundwater, and the nitrogen fertilizers ride down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, where they “fertilize” algae and create a dead zone.

Besides all that, producing ethanol requires monstrous huge amounts of water–3 1/2 to 6 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol. What’s more, “with each gallon of ethanol you get 12 gallons of sewagelike effluent produced by the fermentation/distillation process.”

Now here’s the kicker. Salon.com has this bombshell:

The Bush administration states that corn-based ethanol only accounts for 3 percent of global food price inflation. ….

But now the U.K.’s the Guardian is reporting that it has laid its hot hands on a confidential World Bank report that makes the astonishing claim that 75 percent of the surge in global food prices can be attributed to biofuels.

The figure emphatically contradicts the U.S. government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3 percent to food-price rises. ….

Senior development sources believe that the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush. “It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.

The Salon.com writer calls biofuel mandates a “crime against humanity.”

So, Ms. Steelman, on this issue, I agree with you.

Among progressives, some of us are for ethanol use, others are agin it. Ken Midkiff of the Missouri Sierra Club, in an op-ed piece that he wrote for the Joplin Globe, lays out the case against it (and, by the way, the case against drilling in ANWR).

He’s convincing. Read on past the Midkiff excerpt to see what McCaskill and Obama have to say on the ethanol question.

Pogo famously said “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That is where we find ourselves when it comes to the high price per gallon of gasoline (which seems to go up almost daily).

While it is only human to want to blame someone, such as “liberals and environmentalists,” the fact is that we are all to blame. We have used oil and oil products, such as gasoline, as if there was no tomorrow.

Environmental groups and liberals in the U.S. Congress have decried the government largesse flowing to ethanol, which is extolled as a “green solution” by those who view “green” only as the color of money.

As has been pointed out many times, ethanol could not make it in a true free market economy. A corn grower pointed out that right now, ethanol production is subsidized at about 85 cents per gallon. Remove that 85 cents and ethanol plants would be money-losers and would go belly-up.

There are other problems with ethanol:

* Some scientists claim that it takes more energy than it produces. The corn grower I was speaking with told me that, due to more efficiencies in production, the ratio is currently 1:1. In short, it takes a gallon of energy to produce a gallon of energy. That’s hardly worth it.

* If every kernel of corn raised in this country were converted to ethanol, that fuel would meet about 7 percent of our energy demands.

* One unintended consequence of converting so much corn to ethanol is that food prices have skyrocketed to the point that people in developing nations can’t afford groceries and are quite literally starving.

Bottom line: Don’t blame environmentalists or liberals for our tax monies going to support ethanol production.

Those who would blame environmentalists and liberals for our current high gasoline prices are probably thinking of opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve or opposition to drilling on public lands. That’s all true; we are opposed to such. But, the amount of oil in ANWR would meet about 6 months’ worth of demands, and to achieve this modest amount, we would have decimated a relatively pristine area. Maybe ANWR isn’t very inviting to humans; but caribou love it. Caribou and drilling equipment, pipelines and other accouterments of the gas and oil industry don’t get along very well.

Claire’s website:

Claire strongly supports reducing our demand for oil and developing alternative fuels, both to improve our national security and to support Missouri’s farmers. Investing in ethanol is an important first step towards developing renewable fuels. We also need to develop even cleaner, more efficient cellulosic ethanol, which can be produced from biomass. Claire believes in developing local production of feedstocks and fuels and local and farmer ownership of processing plants. Claire will fight to make sure that ethanol production does not end up being controlled by a few big out-of-state corporations and will promote incentives that favor smaller-scale, farmer-owned processing facilities.

Associated Press report about Obama:

Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday the federal government might need to rethink its support for corn ethanol because of rising food prices, a stance similar to Republican John McCain’s but at odds with farm states considered important to the November election.

“What I’ve said is my top priority is making sure people are able to get enough to eat. If it turns out we need to make changes in our ethanol policy to help people get something to eat, that has got to be the step we take,” said Obama, D-Ill., on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Perhaps Claire actually sees Obama’s point by now and just needs to revise her website. Or not. Since the two of them hail from corn producing states, their original support for ethanol subsidies was predictable. Anyway, I’m glad to see Obama shift his stance.