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Hillary Clinton was right — the first time. In her years in the Senate, she opposed the federal government’s ethanol mandates. It’s only now, with the 2016 Iowa caucuses looming on her political horizon, that she’s reversed herself and supports ethanol.

You see, Iowa has corn. And corn farmers love the ethanol mandates. They’re pretty much the only people left who do; Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists and humanitarians all agree ethanol is bad policy.

“While Clinton was in the U.S. Senate, she voted against the ethanol industry 17 times,” reports the Manhattan Institute. “In a 2002 letter, she and three senate colleagues called then-pending legislation that was to require the blending of two billion gallons of corn ethanol per year into domestic gasoline supplies ‘an astonishing new anti-consumer government mandate.’ That same year, during a floor debate on the proposed mandates, she said she found it ‘impossible to understand why any pro-consumer, pro-health, pro-environment, anti-government mandate member of this body would vote for this provision.'”

She was exactly right then. But she’s changed her mind.

“I believe the United States can and must be the clean energy super power for the 21st century,” she wrote in the Iowa Gazette. “Yet there are still some here in America — even candidates for President — who want to keep the deck stacked for the fuels of the past. They support wasteful subsidies for oil and gas, block investments in new clean technologies, and even deny the science of climate change.”

She specifically points to “biofuels” as a “clean” technology.

“Domestic renewable fuel production has expanded by more than 350 percent over the past decade with enough supply in the market today to fuel more than 30 million cars,” she wrote. “And today U.S. biofuels companies not only offer an alternative to imported oil, they’re increasingly selling their product abroad as well.”

She was right the first time. It’s truly impossible to understand why anyone still supports ethanol — who isn’t a corn farmer.

That’s because ethanol has utterly failed to live up to its promises. It won’t “wean American off foreign oil,” for instance.

“In reality, the United States has vast storehouses of petroleum,” points out energy analyst Paul Driessen. “Hydraulic fracturing alone has unlocked billions of barrels of oil equivalent energy, created 1.7 million jobs, generated hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity and government revenues…”

In fact, the ethanol mandates have forced us to increase imports.

“This renewed production also reduced oil imports — even as increasing ethanol mandates and a persistent drought have forced the U.S.A. to import ethanol from Brazil,” he says.

Ethanol hasn’t lived up to the promise of being better for the environment.

“We are already plowing an area bigger than Iowa to grow corn for ethanol — millions of acres that could be food crops or wildlife habitat,” Driessen notes.

And production of ethanol requires massive amounts of fresh water — thousands of times what it takes to produce energy from hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Hillary Clinton knows this. At least, she used to know it.