Cornell insect professor gains publicity by calling biofuels an “ethically, economically, and environmentally unworkable sham.”

In New York, insect professor David Pimentel released a new call for a rejection of biofuels, writing that “the use of corn and other biofuels to solve our energy problem is an ethically, economically, and environmentally unworkable sham.”

The co-author of a controversial report on energy efficiency with oil industry consultant Ted Patzek, Pimentel wrote a column distributed by Blue Ridge Press, saying that “Some investigators conveniently omit several of these energy inputs required in corn production and processing” in refuting Pimentel’s analysis of corn ethanol’s energy efficiency, and said that subsidies for corn ethanol, pegged at $6 billion in 2006 by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, by are 60 times higher than for a gallon of gasoline.

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