The senator from Big Corn is now the president-elect. And he's buying the hype on biofuels. On Tuesday, Stephen Power of the Wall Street Journal reported that Barack Obama's transition team has been talking to the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) – the trade group funded by the corn ethanol producers – about a bail-out for the ethanol industry. And on Wednesday, Obama announced that the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, would be the next secretary of agriculture. Announcing the selection, Obama said Vilsack would be part of the "team we need" to strengthen rural America, create "green jobs" and "to free our nation from its dependence on oil".

According to Power's story, the RFA provided Obama's team "with some ideas on how to craft the language" on an economic recovery package. Those suggestions include the creation of up to $1bn in short-term credit facilities that could allow ethanol producers to finance their operations" and "a $50bn federal loan guarantee programme to finance investment in new renewable fuel production capacity and supporting infrastructure." The RFA also wants the feds to require that any automaker getting federal bail-out money must begin producing fleets that are "flex-fuel" – thus, able burn fuels containing up to 85% ethanol – no later than 2010.

Vilsack has long been a biofuels booster. While governor of Iowa – America's biggest corn- and corn ethanol-producing state – he promoted corn ethanol production and "cellulosic" ethanol, which can be made from various plant sources. During his run for the White House, which ended in early 2007 when his campaign ran out of money, Vilsack said he wanted to have the US producing 60 billion gallons of renewable fuel per year by 2030. (Current US production, nearly all of it from corn ethanol, is about 10 billion gallons.)

"By picking Vilsack, Obama has bought into the same old deceits about biofuels. No matter how you slice it, they cannot provide the scale of energy needed to supplant large amounts of oil," says Tad Patzek, chairman of petroleum engineering department at University of Texas and a longtime critic of biofuels. "In terms of environmental impacts, biofuels are always worse than conventional gasoline."

To bolster his point, Patzek points to recent studies which show that biofuels produce more carbon emissions than gasoline. There are myriad other problems with biofuels, including serious deforestation and pollution impacts. But the key problem is their effect on food prices. This year, about 4.1 billion bushels – fully one-third of the entire US corn crop – has been diverted into ethanol distilleries. Those 4.1 billion bushels of corn is more than two times as much corn as that produced by the entire EU and more than five times as much as that produced by Mexico.

With the corn ethanol scam, Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the US to burn food to make motor fuel at a time when there is a growing global shortage of food and no shortage of motor fuel. And numerous studies have pointed to the link between the ethanol scam and higher food prices.

An April 8, 2008 internal report by the World Bank (pdf) found that grain prices increased by 140% between January 2002 and February 2008. "This increase was caused by a confluence of factors but the most important was the large increase in biofuels production in the US and EU. Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize [corn] stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate."

In May, Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington, DC-based thinktank whose vision is "a world free of hunger and malnutrition", testified before the US Senate on biofuels and grain prices. Rosegrant said that the ethanol mandates caused the price of corn to increase by 29%, rice to increase by 21% and wheat by 22%. And he estimated that if the global biofuels mandates were eliminated altogether, corn prices would drop by 20%.

Rosegrant added: "If the current biofuel expansion continues, calorie availability in developing countries is expected to grow more slowly; and the number of malnourished children is projected to increase."

Yet another telling report comes from the US department of agriculture. The first page of the 2007 Food Security Assessment (pdf), released in July, says: "The use of food crops for producing biofuels, growing demand for food in emerging Asian and Latin American countries, and unfavorable weather in some of the largest food-exporting countries in 2006-07 all contributed to growth in food prices in recent years."

Despite these many reports, the ethanol scammers continue to claim that they are not to blame for any increases in food prices. For instance, the RFA, the same industry now hoping for an Obama bail-out, recently claimed on its website that "corn demand for ethanol has no noticeable impact on retail food prices."

Perhaps most depressing is the lunacy promoted by the ideologues at Set America Free, a group founded by a group of pro-Iraq war neoconservatives who continue to promote the delusional concept of "energy independence". In a May 6 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, one of the group's leaders, Gal Luft, and his fellow traveler, Robert Zubrin, declared: "Farm commodity prices have almost no effect on retail prices." The two stalwarts concluded their screed by saying that the goal should be to "take down" the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. "Rather than shut down biofuel programmes," they wrote, "we need to radically augment them."

Unfortunately, Obama has bought into the neoconservatives' absurd claim that biofuels are the answer to America's energy challenge. Consumers around the world are going to pay dearly for that delusion.