The menace of ethanol, continued

Kurt Kleiner has a thorough-looking update on "the backlash against biofuels" over at Nature Reports Climate Change (h/t to Rachel's Democracy and Health News). I didn't know that a UN official had called them a "recipe for disaster" (PDF). My favorite Kleiner quote is from Eric Holt-Giminez of the FoodFirst Institute for Food and Development Policy:

I think a lot of environmentalists got caught with their pants down. They were thinking of biofuels in a local, non-industrial way.

Aww, isn't that sweet? You'd think they'd have noticed what happened when they exposed organic food production to the corporate-controlled mercies of federal government regulation. Part of that story's here. (Full disclosure: I live in a part of the country where pretty much every politician from right to left worships at the temple of biofuels in Decatur, Illinois, AKA the ADM headquarters.)