Sarah Steelman’s about-face on ethanol makes this a good time to look at the costs and benefits of the E-10 mandate that Missouuri enacted in 2006. As it happens, both the Missouri Corn Merchandising Council and the Show-Me Institute have studied the…

Alternative Energy Systems, a Kansas City company that was building ethanol plants in Boone County, Iowa, and Kankakee, Ill., told the SEC today that it plans to go out of business. It is the latest of several biofuel firms damaged…

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chief executive of global food giant Nestlé, writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that the cultivation of food crops for fuel “could be the single most destructive set of policy mistakes made in a generation.” Much of his opinion…

Show Me Ethanol, which said in April that it needed more money to finish its plant in Carrollton, Mo., raised $3.9 million from 40 investors and now has the plant up and running.

Show Me raised the money last week, it disclosed in…

Show-Me Ethanol, which is building an ethanol plant in Carrollton, Mo., says in an SEC filing that it has ” incurred expenses higher than were budgeted” and needs $5.1 million to complete construction. The company says it’s trying to raise…

As one grocery shopper told a Post-Dispatch reporter recently, “Things have gotten really expensive” at the supermarket. Food prices rose 4.9 percent last year, partly because of our thirst for corn-based ethanol and partly because of rising demand around the…

Four St. Louis companies saw their stocks double in value during 2007, and three of them have to give some  credit to the alternative-energy craze. MEMC Electronic Materials, up 126 percent, is considered a solar-energy play because its silicon wafers…

Expanding the use of ethanol will cost the U.S.  economy  about $3 billion a year, according to a cost-benefit analysis by Robert Hahn and Caroline Cecot of the Brookings-AEI Joint Center on Regulatory Studies.

On the benefit side, the scholars count the value of…

The coal industry appears to have stolen a page from the Missouri Corn Growers’ playbook. Last year, the corn folks planted a pro-ethanol billboard with photos of a Missouri farmer and a former king of Saudi Arabia. It asked the…

We’re starting a new feature here at StlToday.com, a live chat about business issues. Every Wednesday at noon, I’ll answer questions about the economy, the financial markets, St. Louis businesses or whatever is on your mind. So, mark your calendar…