Ethanol a red herring

A lot of news items have come from Bush's trying to 'encourage' automakers to make E85 compatible cars. But where is all the ethanol for these cars going to come from? More subsidies for corn which is already heavily subsidized? Several articles have stated that the economics of ethanol as a fuel aren't good. We have to heavily subsidize the crop and in actuality put in 75% or more of the energy we get out of it. Perhaps this can be drastically improved, but aren't we putting the cart before the horse. Shouldn't we make it economically viable without subsidies before encumbering automakers with switching costs.

The Sierra club says that automakers get out of the CAFE (fuel efficiency) standards with an E85 loophole. This is a very bad thing.

-- Updated April 2

Well now that I think about it, perhaps 25% efficiency isn't too bad. But you are trading off huge amounts of potential actual food production for ethanol production. I still think it only sounds good if there's more like 50% or better efficiency. Somebody should do a full on cost/joule on solar vs wind vs ethanol taking into account fixed costs like solar panels, turbines, farm machinery.