Gore admits the obvious: US corn ethanol was not a good policy

This article adds a bit more information directly relevant to this issue. Al Gore, who of course claimed “An Inconventient Truth” was oh so scientifically accurate, only to have actual legal trial in the UK find it had more than 9 material fallicies and can now only be shown in UK schools as a political film, with warnings about it having significant scientific errors… Al Gore who presents himself as supposedly understanding science – yet he either never bothered to research using biofuels for ethanol, or worse, knew better and was solely pandering for votes. Either way, incompetant, or just downright evil – or both. Take your pick.
Many years ago when his first book came out I was at the book store and picked it up off the shelf. Opening it to a random page, I read a bit that came across as sort of pensive-whiney, along the lines of “So, here we were, miles and miles from the shore on the boat, and I saw this dead fish float to the surface of the ocean. And I thought to myself how awful it was that even in the middle of the ocean, man’s pollution was killing all the fish….” I closed the book and put it back in utter disgust right then. Like, gee, there couldn’t be any non-man-made causes for a single fish to die anywhere in the ocean? No diseases? No attacks from predator fishes that wound up injuring the fish so it later died? He went on from there without ever mentioning any of those possibilities if I recall correctly. Just how un-scientific can someone get? That was the acute and utter loss of any respect I had for the man’s logic and scientific credibility. /vent
Here’s the article:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/22/gore-on-second-thought-i-was-just-pandering-to-the-farm-vote-on-ethanol/
which adds a little useful supplemental info to Ryan Maue’s article. I imagine many of the associated calculations are controversial depending on who’s doing them and what is or isn’t considered and added in, and I wish they’d included sugarcane. Also, I’m no farmer, but aren’t most of the secondary sources, such as corn stalks, actually quite beneficial as fertilizer/soil conditioners when plowed under? Or is that now moot with no-till farming methods?
Anyhow for whatever it’s worth, here are the key bits from the article I linked above:
Gore now says he supports second-generation ethanol to avoid using food, instead using wood, waste fiber, and grass. But the same Slate report shows that these technologies actually perform worse than corn for ethanol:
David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains.

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.
In addition to their findings on corn, they determined that making ethanol from switch grass requires 50 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol yields, wood biomass 57 percent more, and sunflowers 118 percent more. The best yield comes from soybeans, but they, too, are a net loser, requiring 27 percent more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced. In other words, more ethanol production will increase America’s total energy consumption, not decrease it.

The article also adds an update to their original – they’ve got links embedded in each of the bits below, but I’ll leave that for the reader here to find in their article rather than trying to recreate each here:
Update: On that note, here’s this from commenter Selias:

Google avaiation biofuels and algae. Then Google Al Gore’s investment into biofuel companies like Abengoa.
Then read this article last week in The Hill, written by none other than Abengoa VP, Christopher G. Standlee:
America needs new investment: In the next generation of biofuels
Then ponder the Federal lands and wetlands bonanza buy-ups in recent years, even pointed out by our very own Michelle Malkin.
Why would the progressive Federal gov’t need so much land? With quotes like this:
The Department of Energy says algae grown on a 15,000-square-mile area, about the size of Maryland, could theoretically meet the nation’s oil needs.
…it’s easy to put this puzzle together.

It’s all about Al Gore Inc.

Surely an important point is whether he made money out of it? Has this aspect been investigated? He might say now it was a mistake but what was he doing when he was supporting it back then?