Another damn thing to be pissed off about
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I glanced by this snippet in the earlier article on pet food shortages:
Prices for U.S. corn and soybeans — key ingredients in many pet foods — reached eight-year highs this spring, as these ingredients are being used in the push for biofuels-based renewable energies.
The whole ethanol scam was started under Jimmy Carter, so it’s appropriate that Carter II is still pushing it, but it has never made sense, except as a means of shoveling cash to Wall Street and Iowa. I’ve railed against this folly since at least the beginning of this blog back in 2002, but what the hell, since the government’s still at it, why should I stop now?
It’s even more relevant today, especially because Congress is, yet again, preparing to push for even more ethanol production by boosting the ethanol content in gasoline up from 10% to 15%.
I recommend reading the entire article because it dissects and destroys every one of the big lies about ethanol, from its claimed environmental benefits to energy independence, carbon savings, and its role in saving “the family farm”. I’ll just reprint the conclusion:
One might be tempted to cite the invasion of Wall Street into the ethanol industry as ev- idence that smart people with a lot of money are willing to bet to the contrary. But there is a better explanation: many ethanol invest- ments make perfect sense in light of existing mandates to use the stuff and the lavish sub- sidies available to distill it. Without govern- ment favoritism, it’s unlikely that investment would be more than a tiny fraction of its pres- ent level. In short, people are investing based on the politics of ethanol subsidies, not the economics of ethanol production.
Corn ethanol, as we noted at the outset, is more a religion than a reasoned proposition. People are entitled to their religious beliefs. But there ought to be a steep wall between church and state.
First Quarter 2007
