GREEN MACHINE? At Detroit's premier auto show this January, General Motors unveiled plans for an unlikely "green" Hummer HX--a 6.75-foot-wide model that will run on ethanol. Eager to appeal to an increasingly petrol-wary public, GM also recently struck a deal with energy company Coskata to investigate cheaper methods of producing ethanol. Overall, ethanol production is on track to reach an estimated 11.4 billion gallons this year and as much as 35 billion gallons by 2017.

Putting aside the hype, ethanol's environmental credentials leave much to be desired. Converting corn into fuel is a resource-intensive process that actually uses more energy than it produces. Corn also requires more insecticides, herbicides and nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop, to say nothing of the 1,700 gallons of water needed to produce one gallon of ethanol. If scaled similarly to the smaller Hummer H3, the HX will require almost 450 pounds of corn to fill its twenty-three-gallon tank with pure ethanol. That's enough corn calories to feed one person for an entire year. At a fuel efficiency of barely fifteen miles per gallon, a full tank will get the "outdoor adventure" vehicle approximately 345 miles closer to nature.   BRETT STORY

A PREMATURE ANTIFASCIST: When 21-year-old Milton Wolff met Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote to his girlfriend in Brooklyn, "Ernest is quite childish in many respects. He wants very much to be a martyr...." One year later, Wolff was commanding the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the US volunteers who fought against Francisco Franco's fascist rebellion.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.