Interesting
Not particularly political, but I've recently followed up on some of the, technological aspects of Bio-Fuel production, and discovered some information on the subject that is quite revealing.

The word's top producer of Ethanol now is the United States, but its industry is inflated by government subsidization and the sheer immensity of the land the continent has available for agricultural uses. The second largest Ethanol producer in the world, is Brazil, which has been using Ethanol fuel since the 1990's, because leftovers from its sugarcane crops would have otherwise gone to waste, and because sugar based products convert to ethanol extremely well. America does not import much of it's ethanol from Brazil, as it currently imposes a fifty two cent import on every gallon of Ethanol imported, basically a big enough import to counter the subsidy on the Ethanol.

Where as Brazil uses sugar crops to create it's Ethanol, America has been using corn, not because it converts well, but rather because until recently it's been a fairly inexpensive readily available grain. However, corn must first be converted into sugar before it can be converted into Ethanol, making it an inefficient and expensive process. Factors such as these are largely going to doom the corn based ethanol industry, but there is a very compelling alternative which could potentially displace corn use for a much smaller cost, Sugar Beet Ethanol.

Sugar Beet's are hardy and can grow in nearly any environment with an actual summer, making them a more versatile crop than sugar cane. They convert into ethanol very easily, for a fraction of the price, and in places such as California they can even be grown in the winter. The downside is that this crop isn't yet grown on the scale it would need to be to displace corn. Scaling sugar beet production up however, is very conceivable, given the versatility of the crop.

Of course, this isn't a magic bullet solution, just because this would be more efficient doesn't mean we'll magically be able to quickly scale this up to meet the artificial ethanol needs imposed on America. However, as with Cellulistic Ethanol and scaling down ethanol mandates, this could be a component of the solution.

On an additional note. Corn is a very nutritionally intensive crop that makes it very difficult to grow. If you grow corn in a field, the next year you won't be able to use the same field to grow corn again because too many nutrients will have been stripped from the soil for more corn to grow. Sugar beets should not have this problem, so with reasonable fertilization, the same fields should be able to produce the same amount of sugar beets year after year. It would seem to me that this simple fact should make sugar beets far more sustainable for Ethanol production than Corn would be.