Remember that government subsidies to ADM (and related firms, along with the ethanol companies that are now folding left and right) don't line the pockets of big donors and don't garner votes in the flyover states. Remember that McCain came out against ethanol and was destroyed in Iowa.

The use of numbers like "75", "3", "40" as "percentages", coming from prestigious organizations, really mislead people into thinking that this is an equation that can be answered. To really understand the conclusions represented by a single or two digit number would require a Talmudic intensity that almost no one (except for Mr. Leonard) is willing to expend.

... investing in public transit, pedestrian infrastructure, and bike lanes than in biofuels.

But biofuels are sexy. They give the illusion that we can keep on driving our individual private cars into the future.

Public transit, pedestrian crossings, and bike lanes are boring. They also mean getting out of the beloved car, even if it's small, even if it's a hybrid, even if it plugs into the wall.

So what if the feds took those biofuel subsidies and poured them into transit agencies large and small? What if they helped towns without transit form bus systems? What if they helped do boring ordinary things like build park and ride garages across the suburbs so people could more easily take the bus? But again, parking garages are boring.

This isn't a bombshell to anyone who has an inkling of economics. Of COURSE prices of food are going to go up when there is a completely distorted market for grains. The market was horribly distorted by governments that were urged on by companies like ADM that stood to make tons of money and the environmentalists, who, acting the useful idiot role, demanded more ethanol.

Now that ethanol has been proven to be a complete boondoggle and waste of everyone's money, can we move on and start looking for REAL solutions?

If biofuels mandates are a 'crime against humanity' than basically any action which doesn't minimize food prices is a crime against humanity.

Unless you are willing to make the totally supportable, but in my mind deeply morally wrong, argument that 'property is theft,' or an argument that we have an obligation to not value a commodity more than a poorer person, than this is an awful argument.

Past awful. It is awful the way the idiots who talk about 'post carbon' are awful.

If you want to argue that wealthy nations and wealthy people have a moral obligation to not let poorer people starve than have at it. But growing crops for fuel is no more a crime against humanity than growing, say, coffee rather than maize is a crime.