This is a complex issue and a long read – but I promise it’s worth your time.
Since energy use is on everyone’s mind right now, from data centers to oil prices, here’s a story I guarantee you haven’t heard.
It’s about ethanol gas, so buckle up. It’s quite a ride.
Let’s start with something almost nobody is aware of. When you fill up your car, did you know you’re not buying pure gasoline?
Up to 10% of what comes out of the pump is ethanol, which is alcohol made from corn. It’s been mixed into American gas for years.
Most of us have been buying it the whole time without even thinking about it.
In March, right after we attacked Iran, Trump’s EPA approved selling an even higher mix, 15% ethanol, through the summer. It’s the fifth year in a row a president has done this. And it barely made the news.
The reason they give is that ethanol makes gas cheaper, and it does, by maybe 5 to 25 cents a gallon.
But there’s a catch… cause there’s always a catch.
Ethanol carries less energy than gasoline, so your car goes fewer miles on it. You save a little at the pump and then burn through the tank faster. It’s cheaper to buy and weaker to drive on.
So who actually wants this?
Mostly corn farmers, and right now they’re hurting. They’ve spent years growing more corn than they can sell, which drives the price down and leaves them losing money. When the government forces more ethanol into gas, that uses up more corn, which helps hold the price up.
It’s a way to prop up corn farmers without calling it a bailout. Behind the farmers are the big companies that turn corn into fuel, like POET and ADM, who get guaranteed sales. Behind them is an ethanol industry that spent more than nine million dollars last year lobbying to make sure the farm welfare system stays intact.
Oh – and the same administration pushing more corn into your gas tank is the one that made the corn problem worse in the first place.
Trump’s tariffs raised the price of fertilizer, which farmers need to grow the crop. The tariffs also pushed other countries to buy less American corn. So farmers got squeezed from both sides, because it costs more to grow and there are fewer buyers. Trump even announced a twelve billion dollar bailout, the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, to cover some of the damage. Then, to soak up the corn nobody’s buying, the Trump admin is pushing more of it into the fuel supply by clearing the way for E15. So, right now – not only does gas cost more – it’s weaker. It’s like when the restaurant fills your glass with so much ice – you need a refill after three sips.
Which means – we’re paying for the same mistake twice. We pay once at the pump in worse mileage, and once through the bailout our taxes cover.
What a scam.
But this isn’t a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. Biden did the exact same ethanol move Trump just did. Both parties protect corn, because the first presidential contest every four years happens in Iowa, a corn state, and nobody who wants to be president is willing to upset corn farmers.
This is another reason our presidential primaries shouldn’t be staggered – but I’ll save that argument for later.
Anyway – here’s the thing nobody talks about at all. Making ethanol takes a staggering amount of water. When you count the water to grow the corn, not just to process it into fuel, a single gallon of ethanol can take hundreds of gallons of water. In the driest, most irrigated regions, it can take over a thousand.
Everyone’s worried right now about how much water data centers use, and we should definitely be regulating it – but here’s the comparison nobody makes – corn ethanol has been quietly using water on that same scale for twenty years.
That’s a massive amount of water used on something that is actually pretty useless. At least AI makes pretty pictures.
Calm down – I’m kidding. We’re gonna talk about AI – best believe – just not yet.
Back to Ethanol…
So how did we get stuck here?
Back in 2005, Congress passed a law requiring ethanol in our gas, then expanded it in 2007. At the time it sounded smart to almost everyone. Gas prices had just hit a record. We imported huge amounts of oil and wanted to stop depending on other countries for it. People also believed homegrown corn fuel was cleaner.
The vote wasn’t even close. Plenty of states with no corn at all voted yes.
The problem is that every one of those reasons has since fallen apart. We now produce plenty of our own oil. The clean-fuel case got weaker once people counted the fuel burned to grow and process the corn. But the law is still here. Once something is written into federal law, taking it back out is much harder than putting it in, and since the whole country is currently a dumpster fire – no one is putting together the threads I’m about to connect for you.
But first – there’s a hypocrisy here worth noting.
Republicans love to say everyone should earn their keep and that government shouldn’t be in the business of handouts. Then they spend twenty years protecting a federal law that forces you to buy a product you didn’t ask for, and they cut bailout checks just to keep this one crop afloat. That’s not the free market. That’s the opposite of it. They just don’t call it welfare when it’s corn.
And here’s the thing nobody says out loud. Our farm system doesn’t allow farmers to grow what’s smart. It pays them to keep growing corn.
Actually – the government tilts the whole farming economy toward five crops – corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice, and barely helps the farmers who grow fruit and vegetables. So a farmer who wants to switch to something more profitable is fighting the government’s own thumb on the scale. What’s the line about sucking on the government’s teat?
Maybe I just made that up. But seriously – reform isn’t about taking something away from farmers – like guaranteed sales. It’s about letting them grow what actually makes sense.
And switching some of that corn land would solve a second problem at the same time. A lot of corn is grown on land that drains into our rivers, and the fertilizer it takes runs off into the water and poisons it downstream. So this isn’t just a fuel story. Corn ethanol wastes water on one end and fouls it on the other. Move some of that land to crops that need less of both, and you help the farmer and clean up the water in one move.
The government currently spends tens of billions of dollars a year propping up farms. Most of it goes out as checks that keep farmers doing exactly what they’re already doing. Trump’s latest twelve billion dollar package is the same idea, emergency checks with no plan and no goal, the kind budget watchdogs say is just a road to subsidizing farm income forever.
We’re basically throwing money down the drain.
Imagine spending that same money differently. Instead of a check that covers a fraction of this year’s losses, picture grants to modernize equipment, to bring in the technology that makes a farm more competitive, to help a farmer move into a crop with a real market instead of a government-guaranteed one.
We created the issue of farmers being reliant on the government – at some point – we’ll have to spend tax dollars on bailing them out – just like we always have – but by investing in them. That’s not more farm welfare. It’s the same dollars, aimed at making farmers need the check less every year instead of more.
And here’s the part that ties it all together.
We keep asking why groceries cost so much. Look at what we actually pay farmers to grow. We subsidize corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. Most of that isn’t food you eat. The corn becomes fuel and animal feed. The food that’s actually getting expensive, the fresh fruit and the vegetables, gets almost nothing from the government. So we’ve built a system that pays people to grow fuel and feed, and then we act surprised that real food costs a fortune.
If we want to bring grocery prices down, we should want more farmers growing food people actually eat, not more corn for gas tanks. I won’t tell you that this would fix grocery prices, because plenty other things drive those. But it is backwards to spend billions steering farmers away from the very food that’s breaking your budget.
Which brings me to the district I’m running to represent, because this whole mess lives inside it. Tennessee is a small corn state. We grow well under one percent of the nation’s crop, while places like Iowa and Illinois grow the lion’s share. This law was never written for us. Our farmers are just along for the ride, carrying some of the cost, the worse engines, the tariff squeeze, while the real money and the real lobbying muscle sit a thousand miles north. But this isn’t abstract for us. It touches actual families in District 5 – on both sides.
When I first started thinking about this district, I thought it would be impossible to represent cleanly. My first instinct was that Memphis and the farm towns of northwestern Tennessee would have diametrically opposed agendas. How do you serve a city and a string of rural farm towns at the same time?
But the more I thought about it, the clearer it got. The biggest thing we have in common is that we’re both getting fucked by the government.
Memphis is paying too much for food. The farmers are getting trapped in a system that keeps them broke. Same government, same broken setup, two sides of the same coin. Fix it, and both ends of this district come out ahead.
Every candidate right now is talking about affordability, especially when it comes to groceries. Almost none of them can name one specific thing they would actually do about it.
We force about a third of our corn crop into gas tanks because of a law from 2005, a law that wastes our water, weakens our fuel, props up the wrong crop, and keeps the price of food higher than it needs to be.
It’s time to wind this law down. It’s time to spend the bailout money on making farmers stronger instead of just keeping them afloat. It’s time to stop paying farmers to grow things that serve corporations and not people. It’s time for us to stop paying for this scam twice – once at the gas pump and a second time in bailouts.
If you send me to Congress – this is one of the fights I’ll sink my teeth into.