Re:Very large surface area needed (Score 1, Interesting)

The reason that prices for grains other than corn are also going up is twofold: firstly because of rising demand (from China and India mostly as their economies take off) and a little thing called 'cross price elasticity of supply' which means that if the price of a product goes up, the price of substitutes and near substitutes also rise. At this point it is mostly reason two, but reason one will become more important in the future and it is realised that ethanol sourced corn isn't actually greenhouse friendly in any case, and because of the impact on food prices. And eventually 2nd gen ethanol production will take off, although I notice that the article just talked about area, not economic feasibility. Algae and bacterial sources of ethanol have been looked at for nearly thirty years, but nobody has found a way to do it profitably. The corn used for ethanol is subsidised too. its just that the subsidy is higher than for food grain. Thus the farmers raise the GM corn that is not as good for food as the ordinary corn (but ends up in corn syrup anyway).