[emodendroket]

Well, a lot of people work on a farm who are not by any stretch of the imagination rich, and someone operating a large factory farm is probably not the image that comes to mind when you think "farmer," is what I meant to say.

As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though on the surface being renewable is good.

[Robotbeat]

Ethanol mandates really kicked off in the W administration. I think it's worth remembering that at the time, the primary motivation was probably more geopolitical than climate: ethanol is domestically produced, as are many of the energy inputs (such as electricity and natural gas). The US now produces a non-trivial amount of ethanol, enough that if it were removed from the market, we'd probably import significantly more foreign oil.

But I digress.