Very little US corn and beans is eaten by humans–generally it’s animal feed. But in a globalized market any increase in grain prices impacts people at the bottom of the economic ladder.

There is nothing new about ethanol/methanol as motor fuels. Henry Ford was into it.

Ethanol in gasoline has it’s pros and cons. Recall that we used to put it in intentionally (‘Dry Gas") to deal with accumulated moisture in tanks.

Gasoline is about 114,000 btu/gal and ethanol is about 76,000. So the energy content is a lot less and this is reflected in mileage. But ethanol has a higher anti-knock ("octane") value so cars with adaptive engine management might partially offset the difference with advanced timing, etc. Ethanol-only vehicles (Brazil, mainly, I think) can use higher compression ratios to take full advantage of the properties of ethanol.

There are lots of odd factors at work. EPA was into "oxygenated" fuels as a way of de-facto leaning the mixture ratios. Does this have relevance to injected vehicles with closed loop mixture control? Not sure but I doubt it.