Water Pollution can be result of corn ethanol

Trying to do good for the environment can result in doing wrong to the environment.

Corn ethanol as the answer to global warming and American energy independence can have negative impacts not only on food but on water.

New studies suggest that production of corn ethanol not only makes global warming worse but contributes heavily to water pollution. One reason is the heavy doses of nitrogen fertilizer that American farmers dump on corn fields. A study by Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, argues that some biofuels release more greenhouse gases than they save because nitrogen fertilizer produces nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide as an atmospheric insulator.
The study estimates that corn ethanol produces between .9 and 1.5 times the global warming effect of conventional gasoline.