Just when you'd resolved to fill your SUV with ethanol at one of those new "E-85" fueling stations that Gov. Bill Ritter promises will be scattered about Colorado by year's end, along come some spoilsports to tug at your conscience from another direction.

They say ethanol is going to take food from the mouths of the world's poor.

So what's more important to you: energy independence and this state's "new energy economy," or the fight against hunger?

We haven't reached that fork in the road yet, of course, but stand by. After all, there's a good reason the National Pork Producer Council last weekend called for ending federal ethanol subsidies: The more corn is diverted into producing ethanol, the more its price rises for every other use, including livestock feed.

And the council's concern over food prices is hardly theoretical: The Washington Post reported in late January that "Mexico is in the grip of the worst tortilla crisis in its modern history. Dramatically rising international corn prices, spurred by demand for the grain-based fuel ethanol, have led to expensive tortillas."

Even some prominent environmentalists are becoming concerned over the potential for the worldwide pursuit of bio-energy to bid up the price of food. As the president of the Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown, has complained, "All of this is unfolding as the world's farmers are trying to feed 76 million additional people each year. In six of the past seven years, world grain consumption has exceeded production."

Ah, well: The ethanol bandwagon has left the station and is picking up steam. It is not about to be derailed by pious talk about the price of tortillas in Mexican slums or the the risk of disrupted grain supplies during an African famine. But as you pull into one of those E-85 stations to do your part in promoting energy independence, please keep in mind that no good deed goes unpunished.

White flight

The state House Education Committee this week gutted an allegedly subversive amendment to a bill on charter schools that threatened the education establishment. Such mutinies cannot be tolerated, of course. That's true even when, as in this case, they amount to the possibility that the highly successful Cesar Chavez Academy in Pueblo would open up similar schools elsewhere in the state without the express permission of local school boards. Call it a charter franchising deal to help minority students.

When this admirable amendment was first attached to the bill last week in the Senate, you'd have thought the anarchist flag had been hoisted above the chamber. The bill's sponsor, Arvada Democrat Sue Windels, was outraged, accusing her opponents of taking a "sledgehammer" to her creation. Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald chimed in with the strange judgment that charter schools were vehicles of "white flight."

Cesar Chavez Academy serves a minority population. The schools the amendment authorized would cater to minorities. Minority senators supported the amendment.

Indeed, the only "white flight" visible in recent days at the Capitol has been the spectacle of white Democrats rallying against an amendment allowing the creation of a few schools that would be modeled after the only school in the state rated "excellent" with a student population of at least 75 percent minority.

Now that's the kind of white flight that's truly scary.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.