Bio-temperance in high places

After The Economist, here comes mighty Foreign Affairs with a definite money quote:

Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn — which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year.

Here’s the article’s executive summary:

Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based ethanol is now all the rage in the United States. But it takes so much supply to keep ethanol production going that the price of corn — and those of other food staples — is shooting up around the world. To stop this trend, and prevent even more people from going hungry, Washington must conserve more and diversify ethanol’s production inputs.

I hereby lay claim to bio-temperance as a concept and predict big things for it.