Al Gore admits supporting corn ethanol subsidies was a mistake

Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore has changed his stance concerning ethanol. As vice president, Gore created subsidies for corn-based ethanol. The move, it turns out, was aimed more towards garnering votes for his upcoming presidential run than doing what's best for the environment. At a recent green energy conference in Athens, Greece, Gore said:

It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol. One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.
The process to turn corn to ethanol – i.e., first-generation ethanol – is pretty inefficient, using tons of water with only modest energy returns. In 2008, the bio-fuel industry got flak for larger and larger quantities of the corn crops being used to create ethanol resulting in a rise in food prices. Even with his admission that he was more about the votes than the science in the ethanol debate, he has not completely abandoned the biofuel. He now favors what is called second-generation ethanol, which uses farm waste and switchgrass instead of corn to produce the fuel.

Al Gore admits supporting corn ethanol subsidies was a mistake — Autoblog Green