"compared to gasoline"

Well duh.
The issue isn't how corn ethanol compares to gasoline, it's where it is the best alternative to gasoline. There are many alternatives out there, most are also improving their full lifecycle GHG emissions over time.
The question is 'should we subsidize the farmers to produce corn ethanol for limited gains in full lifecycle GHG emissions or put our money on something else with more potential?'

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What wonderful news!!! And that many, many, more people will starve to death in third world countries because of the increase in food prices due to burning our food for fuel... Well, they aren't people like we are people so they should die of starvation, right? All sacrificed on the altar of the god Climate Change® (formerly known as Global Warming® but rebranded when temperatures started to fall).

Stop burning our food for fuel. Algae based biodiesel can be grown in desert wastelands and can easily fuel the entire country. See:

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

People, third world or not, matter.

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many, many, more people will starve to death in third world countries because of the increase in food prices due to burning our food for fuel... Well, they aren't people like we are people so they should die of starvation, right? All sacrificed on the altar of the god Climate Change®

I seem to remember GWB pushing corn ethanol, and he was also the one who pushed Climate Change® as an alternate term to Global Warming - Rebranded not because temperatures started to fall but because it sounded less threatening.

Goracle,

The old tired and proven wrong by so many people in so many ways argument of food vs fuel is so rediculous it's amazing anybody still believes it. Over half of the food produced on this planet every year goes to waste. When 100% of the food produced every year is eaten then you can try that argument. Now for some real facts.

Of the 78.7 million acres of corn recently planted in this country only 1% of it ever made it into the mouths of humans unmodified as real food. 12% was made into junk like corn chips and high fructse corn syrup(5%) and some useful products like corn meal/flour, grits, etc. No other country(there might actually be 1 or 2)will accept our corn to feed it's people because it is all genetically modified(thanks Monsanto) and unfit for human consumption in their eyes. 87% of all our corn was used to fatten up livestock in this country and other rich countries. All of the starch in that corn was wasted because most livestock, cattle especially, cannot digest the starch in corn. In fact it creates some pretty serious problems in their digestive tracts causing feedlot bloat and acidosis(both can kill cattle) and shuts down their absorption of other nutrients. Making ethanol from that corn first solves all those problems by producing a much higher quality animal feed that produces more meat and more milk in less time and reduces veterinary costs by over 90% on average. Plus we are getting a very high quality fuel from a normally wasted resource.

As far as your algea bio-diesel goes, the algea and kelp would be much better utilized making ethanol and doing a secondary enzyme and/or bacterial fermentation to produce methane that would be used to generate all the heat and electricity to distill the ehtanol and leave a huge excess to be sold back to the grids. Just like they do in Brazil with the sugar cane.

Mike, by all means let's get "fuel from a normally wasted resource" but let's not forget America just doesn't have enough land to replace all oil with corn ethanol. Even the best projections say 9% is as much as could be replaced.
In contrast some people have been researching ethanol boosting which can achieve as much as a 30% reduction in overall gasoline consumption using perhaps 5% ethanol.
http://www.ethanolboost.com/

Cattle can't digest starches?  Excuse me, what do you think both starches and cellulose depolymerize into?

There's a rather firm limit of distiller's grains that cattle can withstand; I found a report stating that one feeder tried 50% DDG but had calves dying of sulfur toxicity.  Even if corn could generate all its own fertilizer (HA!), corn ethanol is no panacea.

Alternatively, a windshield cleaner fluid (an alcohol–water mixture which is generally a methanol-water mixture) can be used as the anti-knock fluid, which is nice because it means your car wouldn't need an extra tank for the anti-knock fluid (if it already has a windshield cleaner fluid system), just an injection system.

Bypass the plants just go straight from sunlight or wind to electric.

Lightweight and make the body as aerodynamic as possible,
Use electric as the main motive system,
Radically downsize the ICE as its only required to charge the batteries,
Then look at alternative fuels for the ICE.

If liquid fuel demand can be cut in half with electrification, the contribution from bio-fuels doubles

@3PeaceSweet

That's a formula that would work, now all we have to do is bring the EV1 back from the dead. [Lightweight, aerodynamic as possible and electric as the main motive system]

I think this is also a social issue. People need to be better educated about what their food is and where it comes from. I'd guess that 90% of the people out there don't understand that meat cannot simply be "made" in a factory feedlot. Rather, that feedlot has to be fed with plant material grown somewhere else on the landscape, and this takes up valuable space. I have often heard people go so far as suggesting that we are actually doing the feedlot animals a favour because if we weren't eating them they wouldn't even have lived at all!! Talk about passing off personal responsibility...

Well this of course ignores the point that if those animals weren't living in a factory feedlot then they wouldn't have to be fed by growing a monoculture GMO corn farm somewhere else, and that land would instead be available for some other animal to live off of it, presumably not in a factory feedlot.

Most people don't understand that because cows and other animals we eat are further up the food chain than vegetables, they require much more land. I don't know what the numbers are, but let's say that it takes 10 times more land area to produce a pound of beef than a pound of vegetables. Well, Westerners eat too much meat anyways, and not enough vegetables. And when the developing world's income rises then they will start demanding more meat, which will really put pressure on farmland. I think what is needed is a massive educational campaign to teach people basic Ecology 101 and Nutrition 101. Too many people are under the impression that eating MacDonalds is a victimless crime. It has gone on far too long that the main educators about food have been fast food corporations advertising to children. This needs to change.

True, it just needs the single cylinder 7kW diesel engine from the VW 1 litre car to cruise on.

Lots of people can agree that corn is not the way to go. Jimmy Carter called ADM in the late 70s to see if they could do it in the short term. It was never meant to be part of the national energy policy for the long term.

That is why Carter had the Synthetic Fuels program. We need to take biomass and make fuel. We needed to do this in 1978 and we need to have done this in 2008 and beyond. One of these days we may actually get off our collective behinds and actually DO it.

For example, an 18-ounce box of corn flakes contains about 12.9 ounces of milled field corn. When field corn is priced at $2.28 per bushel (the 20-year average), the actual value of corn represented in the box of corn flakes is about 3.3 cents (1 bushel = 56 pounds). (The remainder is packaging, processing, advertising, transportation, and other costs.) At $3.40 per bushel, the average price in 2007, the value is about 4.9 cents. The 49-percent increase in corn prices would be expected to raise the price of a box of corn flakes by about 1.6 cents, or 0.5 percent, assuming no other cost increases.

And then there's the mileage our food gets. When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles.

EP:

Chicken and swine happily digest starch. Cattle is different matter. Ruminants adapt to specific diet, without middle ground: grain-fed cattle digest starch, but have more digestive problems. Forage-fed cattle digest proteins in supplement grain feed, but waste almost all starch. As such, grass-fed cows are better off with DSG, not corn. It is how microbiota in their stomach works. And of course, there are limits of what amount of protein-rich feed all livestock could healthy digest.

“Lots of people can agree that corn is not the way to go.”

This is called the California consensus theory. All those with agenda agree they do not like all the practical ways of doing things which leaves them promoting the impractical. Of course when something becomes practical and Shell starts doing it, they will agree that it is not the way to go.

In 2000, years of bad state policy resulted in a local energy crisis in California. When Bush came to office a short time later we got the National Energy Policy, May 2001. Five years later, California came up with their own energy policy that achieved consensus.

Before Bush was elected, California was calling for ethanol as a fuel additive.

So here we are in 2009. The California PUC bragged about how well California's RPS is promoting new projects with more than 500 MWe of new capacity in 2008. I opened the report the article was based on at the CPUC web site just to be greeted with the typical jargon filled smoke screen that you get from California. However, there was a spread sheet that listed the names and location of the projects.

So how much of the new projects completed in 2008 were outside of California? Drum roll please!

About 430 MWe of the capacity was built someplace else. About 45 MWe was new in California, the rest were repower projects.

And where is the ethanol being produced. Not much in California.

As it turn out lots of people agree that how ethanol is getting done is pretty good. Same with renewable energy for making electricity.

Jimmy Carter's energy policy was a failure. California's energy policy is a failure. While there is useful to studying failure, it is much better policy to make progress and learn from that progress.