Even as producers have urged the EPA to lift this bar, it has challenged them to move beyond corn and make ethanol from cellulose, the abundant, inedible portion of most crops.
Corn ethanol also has no chance of curing the nation's addiction to foreign oil. (Ethanol from cellulose would be more of a winner, but the technology does not yet exist.) Neither of these inconvenient truths will necessarily prevent U.S. politicians from bailing out the distillers.