Ted Poe: “I want to talk about the energy policy this Congress has passed recently. This Congress has decided to spend a lot of…”

“I want to talk about the energy policy this Congress has passed recently. This Congress has decided to spend a lot of taxpayer money and subsidize this concept of corn-based ethanol in the United States. We are sending a lot of money to farmers to grow corn so that it can be burned in our vehicles. Now, I don't blame the farmers for what they do. After all, we have encouraged them to produce corn-based ethanol. But the problem with corn-based ethanol is it is a pollutant. Now we are finding out from Science Magazine that it's a pollutant more so than was first thought from the beginning. Because of the subsidies, we are encouraging corn-based ethanol. It also has raised corn prices throughout the world because no longer are we eating corn, we are burning it in our vehicles. It has increased the amount of land that we are tilling up, grasslands, for example, forest, for example, and turning it into agricultural land where we produce corn-based ethanol to burn in our vehicles. It's also expensive. Everything that has to do with corn products has raised in prices over the last 2 years because we are not using corn in our foodstuffs, we are burning it in our vehicles. But probably the greatest problem with corn-based ethanol is how it's produced. Corn is one of those commodities that takes a lot of fertilizer. In fact, it takes more fertilizer to produce corn than any other product that we eat, such as rice or wheat or even the grasslands.”