So, Sen. John McCain is the presumptive GOP nominee. Considering that tomorrow's Valentine's Day and all, we need to find the guy his winning match. A great vice-presidential candidate will really help "round out" the ticket and assuage his many detractors, come convention time. A Simon for his Garfunkel. A Sonny for his Cher. Below are some of the contenders that everyone's buzzing about.
Biofuels seem like a great idea. Our country produces a ton of cheap corn every year. Our country also consumes a lot of fuel, particularly fossil fuels, which happen to pollute the environment and tether us to other foreign countries. So why not turn all that corn we've been growing into fuel? I, for one, was sold.
But in a surprising twist of events, a recent report notes that the price of corn has raised rather substantially in the past 18 months, from $2/bushel to a staggering $5/bushel. Ethanol production from corn is largely to blame; suddenly, there's not enough industrial corn to sate the rising demand, and complaints about rising food prices, particularly from those countries we export foods to (i.e. Mexico), are steadily increasing.
Meanwhile, another report from the AP suggests that ethanol produced from corn and other cellulosic biofuels could actually create two times as many greenhouse gas emissions as standard gasoline, particularly because of the required land use changes caused by this shift.
