"EPA is pressured to drop ethanol mandate while drought drives corn prices up"

The ethanol rules were originally passed to make old cars burn gas more efficiently by putting more oxygen in the fuel.  But that only applied to cars made before 1972.  After that date, cars have a oxygen censor.  If there is less oxygen in the gas, the fuel injection system puts more oxygen in the gas.  Putting more oxygen in the fuel through ethanol has no impact.

There are also other costs from these rules.  A huge amount of wealth is destroyed by this rule because ethanol is much more costly and less energy producing than gas, plus cars must be made differently because ethanol is corrosive.  There is also formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, that is produced from burning ethanol.

Also from Fox News:

With record drought destroying crops across the country, corn prices are skyrocketing, and that is causing a world-wide ripple effect, including on the cost of the corn-derived gasoline additive ethanol.
Corn prices are up 60 percent this summer, Christopher Hurt, a Purdue University economic professor, estimates. And now Democratic governors from Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina and Arkansas have joined ranchers, poultry farmers and the United Nations director-general for food and agriculture in asking the Environmental Protection Agency to waive the federal requirement that gasoline contain 10 percent ethanol.
"It's universally acknowledged that ethanol is raising the price of food," Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute said. "It's not lowering the price of gas. In fact, it may be raising the price of gas, and it's having a devastating environmental effect in terms of coastal pollution." . . .