From The New Yorker, Deal Sweeteners:
What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same [distilling better ethanol from sugarcane rather than corn]? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best.
Interesting. And, like so many interesting things involving politics and special interests, depressing.
