A generation ago, I attended college out in Iowa. One of the first things I noticed upon moving there is the way that corn gets pushed into just about everything. Ethanol was the proposed wonderfuel back then, and we heard quite a bit about it, but that wasn’t the only bit of cornstuff we were fed. I still remember the yellow and green plastic pen made from corn I was handed at orientation. I was told that the pen was environmentally friendly. These days, biofuels are all the rage in Iowa, with the promise that Iowa’s big corporate farms could extract a better profit from their fields if only petroleum were replaced with a plant-based source of energy.

Iowa’s Senator Charles Grassley has always been at the forefront of the corn-for-America agenda, and has enthusiastically hopped on board the promotion of biofuels. Yesterday, however, Grassley sounded a bitter note in a speech before the Senate. He observed that biofuels tax credits had not been extended in time for the beginning of 2010, and blamed the Democrats for it.

“The Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate, and not Republicans, are responsible for the failure to pass a tax extenders bill before the end of this year. This failure has very serious consequences to the U.S. biodiesel industry, which will grind to a halt as of January 1, 2010. I remind my colleagues of the economic challenges faced by this industry.”

Will biodiesel businesses truly grind to a halt on January 1, 2010, merely because they’ve temporarily lost a federal tax credit? If so, it seems that the biodiesel industry is not at all economically sustainable.

The truth is, despite the “green jobs” talk that Senator Grassley and other Midwestern politicians give us, biofuels aren’t environmentally sustainable either. It takes about as much energy to grow, harvest and process biofuels as the biofuels themselves contain. Besides that, biofuels, just like fossil fuels, create greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, as well as other pollutants, when burned.

Biofuels are more economically advantageous than fossil fuels for the Midwest, where they are grown, but that’s no reason for the federal government to invest in biofuels through tax credits. Given that biofuels don’t provide a genuine green advance in our nation’s energy, biofuels businesses ought to be left to sink or swim on their own.