American Corn is a HUGE industry that doesn't actually produce much food. You can drive 1,500 miles in a mostly straight line across the Midwest and be surrounded by corn the ENTIRE TIME and out of everything you see only maybe 20-24% will actually be used for human food. (mostly in the form of high fructose corn syrup)

The worst thing is ethanol really isn't very eco-friendly. We are destroying the Midwest to feed our cars. Again I really can't express just how truly large the corn (and soybean) industry is. We have huge issues with nitrogen runoff in the Midwest. Nearly every lake is a solid opaque green with the algae feeding off the nitrogen and killing our aquatic creatures. This effect extends all the way down the Mississippi creating a "dead zone" in the gulf. All that nitrogen fertilizer creates massive amounts of nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas in such large amounts it completely negates any benefit to using ethanol in our gasoline.

There were roughly 80,000,000 acres in corn production in the Midwest last year. Of that 40% went to ethanol production. (~33% to livestock, 13% exported, 14% to direct food production) So 32,000,000 acres in ethanol corn production. Finding stats on the specific number of acres in California devoted to grown food is rather difficult but the U.S. Ag Service says California had 25,000,000 acres in mixed farm and ranch. (this includes almonds, grapes, milk cows, etc) There are things that can't grow in the Midwest at a large scale successfully - most citrus and early blooming nuts like almonds, a few varieties of grapes that require a microclimate for flavor. Keeping to standard mono-cropping, outdoors, and oldschool agriculture, (Japanese indoor agriculture is WAAY more water and nutrient efficient) (High intensity bio-diverse small farms are also more productive per acre with less water and WAY less nitrogen run-off0 we could easily grow everything that California does in the Midwest, or at least split the burden on 2 separate aquifers.

TL;DR So yeah, ethanol is dumb. We should spend our money subsidizing power sources that are actually renewable and spend our land growing food.