Water scarcity around the world was increasing faster than expected, with agriculture accounting for 80 percent of global water consumption, the world authority on fresh water management told a development conference in Canberra.

The US will probably get on the corn ethanol boondoogle. I think the US would be able to use ethanol as a stop-gap measure to help ease the transition away from fossil fuels, but as they don't seem to want to transition away from fossil fuels, it will amount to nothing.

The "debunking" of biofuels that you refer to is afew's biofuels consultation paper. The conclusion I got from our analysis was that the EU barely has the spare agricultural capacity to run on 6% biofuels [biodiesel is hopeless except for farmers' own use, and we could run 10% ethanol fuel on the gasoline side].

I see two reasons why US might do better that the EU with biofuels: the lower population density (a factor of 3!) and the fact that the US is south of the EU (Madrid is on the same latitude as San Francisco or New York City) and so has a substantial subtropical zone (in the South East). If the US replaced its tobacco and cotton plantations with sugar crops they would do much better than Europe ever could.

If an international market for ethanol develops (and I can't see why not), the US might even be able to price Brazil out of its own ethanol production.

The EU can at best replace foreign oil dependency with foreign biofuel dependency.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman