My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in this process likely takes away from subsidies to other forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for energy independence and overall standard of living in the US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and likely relatively short investment period that would last and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating to see the resistance to this one, being both less disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can think of.

This is a fair point as it's not just simply using ethanol for gasoline. This article goes into more depth about it: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501605122

There's lot of factors at play here:

- Location for generating PV

- Redistribution of food (both for livestock and human) production

- Environmental impacts of PV vs livestock vs depletion of native prairies

Point still stands...if you replaced all of the land used to produce ethanol with PV, you would create a surplus of energy that is higher than anything we could imaginably consume today (hint - China is essentially already doing this)

The problem is corn requires a lot of fossil fuel energy input, mostly in the form of fertiliser. The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs.

Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for by drivers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance