The six biggest public ethanol producers have lost almost $9 billion in market value in the last three years, the Financial Times reports. But none of this free-market craziness will keep ethanol from flowing into your car in the coming years: The federally mandated Renewable Fuel Standard requires an increase in the blending of biofuels each year, and in practice this usually means ethanol, the most mature biofuel industry out there. That’s largely because about $80 billion in taxpayer subsidies, according to experts’ estimates, have gone into entrenching ethanol, despite its failure either to decrease US dependence on imported oil or decrease greenhouse gas emissions—the two things the government declared it would accomplish.

With the subsidies, ethanol production has doubled in the US since 2005, when the Energy Policy Act required refiners to blend renewable fuels into their gasoline. Import tariffs simultaneously excluded cheaper, more environmentally-friendly ethanol distilled from Brazilian sugarcane—encouraging American ethanol to be produced domestically from petroleum-intensive corn (which then had to be replaced on the global food market, often by clearing land, thereby ramping up greenhouse gas emissions even further).

Verasun’s problems came to the fore this summer, when corn prices rose to approximately $8 per bushel, as a result of a threat of flooding that could have decimated harvests in the Midwest. Fearing further increases in the price of its key crop, Verasun locked itself into long-term corn contracts. Corn prices unexpectedly plummeted to $4 per bushel, sticking Verasun with overpriced corn. Badly-timed investments in new mills amplified the profit-sucking impact.

To make a bad situation even worse, the price of ethanol has risen decisively above that of gasoline, Platts’ energy blog reports. That’s really bad news for the industry, which had gained its initial foothold among refiners by being cheaper than gasoline; blending gas with ethanol was a way to make fuel more cheaply.

So this mess of government regulations, sacred because of Iowa’s position on the presidential-campaign calendar and the disproportionate influence of corn-state Senators, has made for a guaranteed market—a nice boon for American ethanol producers. But everything else is making it hard to keep the lights on.

Ethanol: the biofuel that environmentalists love to hate. And yet it lingers, irritatingly.