More Videos
- U.S. Stocks Slip, Dollar Rises
- How Stock Investors Can Play Holiday Travel
- Time Lapse World Series Is A Great Play
- Hirschhorn: Greed...or Fear
- My Top 10 Tech Toys for the Holidays
- iPhone a Better Gaming Platform Than Android?
- May Day For Dendreon
- 100% Mortgage Financing From USDA
- Holiday Tipping: Who And How Much
- Wall Street Finds Profits by Reducing Mortgages
- Kraft Weighs Higher Cadbury Bid as Rivals Circle
- Microsoft, News Corp Weigh Online News Pact
- Warren Buffett, Bill Gates 'Walk & Talk' At Columbia
- Senate Democrats at Odds Over Health Care Bill
- What if a Recovery Is All in Your Head?
- Thanksgiving Week Stuffed With Economic News
- 10 Tips to Get Out of Debt
- This Season: Everybody's A Scrooge
RSS FEED
Funny Business
Text Size 
ETHANOL FIGHTS BACK
Everyone is blaming ethanol for everything. Producers have gone from being heroes to zeroes. On Friday, I have three stories you can see here, showing what it's like to be in that industry now. Two years ago, corn was $2 a bushel and margins were $2 a gallon — and everyone and their brother wanted in.
Now corn is $6 and margins are 10 cents — or negative, for some operators.
The ethanol industry's defense is this: Don't blame us for $125 oil. They say ethanol is actually making gasoline cheaper (it's also subsidized by more than 50 cents a gallon).
And the industry claims ethanol's corn needs are only responsible for 2-3 percent of food inflation. You can't blame rice and wheat prices on ethanol. (Well, maybe some wheat, as farmers switched to corn.)
One of the more compelling arguments I heard was against lifting the tariff against cheaper Brazilian ethanol. Brian Sherbacow, former COO of the now-bankrupt Ethanex, says that would only make us dependent on yet another foreign country for energy, which would defeat the whole purpose of our national investment in homegrown biofuels.
(Contd.)
____________________________________
Ethanol Players:
Pacific Ethanol [PEIX
Loading...
()
]
Verasun Energy [VSE
Loading...
()
]
Archer-Daniels-Midland [ADM
Loading...
()
]
____________________________________
Make no mistake, while corn sits in the silos, ethanol producers feel they're sitting in missile silos, as everyone from environmentalists to Big Oil to non-corn farmers to angry consumers launch verbal attacks. What a difference two years makes.
Questions? Comments? Funny Stories? Email
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes