AP

FILE: Former U.S. Vice President and environmentalist Al Gore is silhouetted against an image of the earth during his June 8 talk about climate change in Manila, Philippines. Gore said at a green energy business conference in Athens that lobbyists have wrongly kept alive the ethanol program he once touted.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore reportedly has had a change of heart on ethanol, telling a conference on green energy in Europe that he only supported tax breaks for the alternative fuel to pander to farmers in his home state of Tennessee and the first-in-the-nation caucuses state of Iowa.

Speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank, Gore said the lobbyists have wrongly kept alive the program he once touted.

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Reuters quoted Gore saying of the U.S. policy that is about to come up for congressional review. “First-generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president,” the wire service reported Gore saying.

Credits for corn ethanol subsidies expire at the end of the year unless Congress moves to renew the $7.7 billion annual program. Opponents of the corn subsidies say that it removes valuable food products from the table because the U.S. ethanol industry drives up the price of corn.

Reuters reported that Gore attributed a variety of factors to the food pricing crisis that has emerged, but that biofuels definitely have had an effect.

“The size, the percentage of corn particularly, which is now being (used for) first-generation ethanol definitely has an impact on food prices,” he said. “The competition with food prices is real.”

Ethanol production this year will reportedly consume 41 percent of the