Higher food prices, soaring fuel costs and food riots have all led to "new questions" about ethanol's usefulness, according to one news report.

Well, yes and no.

Good questions are being raised -- but they're hardly new.

Skeptics have long argued that ethanol is more of a political solution than either an energy or environmental one.

Fact is, ethanol makes almost no sense for either energy use or environmental protection.

The politicians love it, though, especially when running in Iowa's first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses. ABC News' John Stossel, for instance, reported that Hillary Clinton voted against ethanol 17 times before becoming an Iowa-bound presidential candidate.

Politicians in both major parties, especially in big farm states, are huge fans of ethanol -- so much that they use your tax money to help produce it.

"If it made a lot of sense," says senior fellow Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute, "we wouldn't have to subsidize it or mandate its consumption."

When the U.S. Senate approved a mandate in 2005 that 8 billion gallons of ethanol be in use by 2012, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., warned of its folly.

"I think this is a mistake that will cost the Federal Treasury $2 billion by the time it is fully implemented and could further pollute California's air," she said.

Things are much worse than that. Ethanol accounts for only about 3 percent of fuel today. But with farmers increasingly planting corn for use in ethanol to power cars, critics say world food prices have risen as a result. There have been food riots and shortages in some countries, including tortilla riots in Mexico and pasta protests in Italy.

Corn meal prices have risen 60 percent in Mexico, while flour prices have doubled in Pakistan.

A growing, hungry and politically inept world is mostly to blame, but biofuel programs also have aggravated matters, and have helped drive up prices.

"We're burning food," Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues, told one broadcast network.

Meanwhile, Avery says, we'll need twice as much food by 2050 to feed the 8 or 9 billion people living on the planet.

Yet, corn helps produce only about 50 gallons of gasoline per acre a year -- and U.S. demand is about 134 billion gallons.

For this, we're sacrificing valuable cropland -- a diminishing resource in an increasingly populated world -- and contributing to soil erosion and water shortages.

"It can't add up," Avery says.

United Nations special rapporteur on food, Jean Ziegler, has called the use of arable land to raise crops for fuel "a crime against humanity."

Indeed, 450 pounds of corn can produce 25 gallons of fuel, or can feed a person for a year. Millions of acres of forest have been cleared for this.

At the very least, it's ridiculously ineffective. A University of Minnesota study says the tedious process of planting, harvesting, transporting and processing corn into ethanol -- then the truck-by-truck process of distributing it, since it can't be transported in pipelines before breaking down -- consumes about as much energy as it produces.

In an article last Oct. 30 titled "Biofuels: a tale of special interests and subsidies, The Financial Times' Martin Wolf writes of biofuel programs, "These are farm programs masquerading as answers to energy insecurity and climate change. Not surprisingly, they have the depressing characteristics of such programs: high protection, open-ended support to producers, and indifference to economic rationality."

David Fridley, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs in Berkeley, Calif., says the hope that ethanol can substitute for oil is farfetched: Even if every single acre of U.S. cornfields today was converted to ethanol production, it would supply about 12 percent of our demand for gasoline.

Oil is simply a more efficient source of energy, Fridley says. And it can be drilled for on the other side of the planet and transported here and processed and put in our cars more cheaply than homegrown ethanol.

Ethanol is a bust and a waste. It's only slightly cleaner, but burns up as much energy as it produces while driving food prices higher and leaving only corn producers better off.

For this, we're burning food?