Last week, EWG released the report Ethanol's Federal Subsidy Grab from our Midwest office in Ames, IA. Here's a roundup of some select media reaction to the report:

The Hill - Obama Faces Key Decisions About Ethanol

But Cox said ethanol mandates have led to more corn production, which has further polluted streams and rivers with fertilizer runoff. A better way to spend the money that now goes to support ethanol would be to increase support for solar and wind power to produce electricity, Cox said.

Grist - Straight Talk on Ethanol

This is scandalous. Ethanol subsidies promote the expansion of industrial corn agriculture -- an environmentally ruinous process. Conservation programs try to mitigate industrially ruinous agriculture -- by, say, leaving buffer strips between chemical-drenched corn fields and streams, or taking marginal land out of production.

In other words, ethanol subsidies and conservation programs are directly at odds (strange, given that ethanol is sometimes sold as an "environmental solution.") It's telling that government largess flows more generously to ethanol than to conservation.

Reason - Big Corn Muscles Aside Solar, Wind and Geothermal Subsidies (Via Andrew Sullivan)

The Environmental Working Group has just issued a report that finds that 75 percent of all renewable fuels tax subsidies in 2007 went to environmentally damaging corn-ethanol production. In addition, the corn ethanol industry, teetering on the edge of collapse despite billions already wasted in subsidies on it, now wants additional billions for a bailout.