Ted Poe: “as gasoline prices soar, as our truckers are about to sit on the side of the road because they can't get enough money to…”

“as gasoline prices soar, as our truckers are about to sit on the side of the road because they can't get enough money to buy fuel for those diesel trucks that they're driving up and down our highways to deliver goods, people are wondering, how did we get here? Well, there are several reasons how we got in this mess, and Congress is partly to blame. First of all, we had this theory that ethanol is going to save us all, so we subsidized the production of ethanol. What that has done is drive food prices up around the world, because in the United States, instead of eating corn or letting it go to feed our beef, we're burning it in our vehicles, and that's caused world food prices to go up, not just in the United States but all over the world. Costco and Sam's Club are now rationing rice. Who would have thought in this year, 2008, in America we can't buy rice because we're tilling up our soil and burning crops. We're also finding out that ethanol can't save us all because, promised to be a nonpollutant, that's wrong. Science Magazine has now reported that ethanol causes more pollution than that nasty old crude oil that we produce. There are a lot of reasons for that. One of those reasons is because it takes a lot of fertilizer to produce corn, and that fertilizer runs down the Mississippi River. And when it gets down in the Gulf of Mexico that nitrogen in the fertilizer kills everything, except algae, and that is called a dead zone.”