Visiting the Renewable Energy Conference in St Louis last November, it was hard to find (apart from the chief economist from the Department of Agriculture) anyone with any doubts that ethanol would be the fuel of the future. And until very recently, apart from some well argued posts here by Robert and other contributors, it would appear that proponents of ethanol had largely convinced the Powers that Be that this was the wave of the future. However, even as the President paid homage to the promise of the fuel in his State of the Union, there has been a growing realism appearing in the writings of the Main Stream Media.

So it is today with the new story in the US News and World Report this week. Their story begins in Galva, Iowa where an ethanol operation has been in production for four years. The farmer-owned co-operative purchases 8.6 million bushels of corn to produce some 23 million gallons of ethanol a year, and, as the story notes, has returned $13 million to the community owners. (Their success is encouraging other local communities to also join the band wagon, although the Arthur plant is planned to be some 5 times larger). But the article also carries some cautions: