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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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FORGIVE MY LACK OF FAITH IN ROLLING STONE…..BUT, WISDOM ON ETHANOL?

Yes, indeed:

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn’t that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after “solutions” that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.

Since we’re already seeing basic food prices rising in poor countries, and affecting mostly the poorest in those countries, it ought to be conventional wisdom that having the government spend mega-millions of dollars SUBSIDIZING the process of turning food into fuel! Yes, we’re not doing this because we’re currently running out of petroleum—we’re running up the deficit in order to satisfy those who think that SOMEday soon we’ll be running out of petroleum, as well as those who think that salvation is gained by reducing their carbon footprint.

Anyhow, you want the truth? Here it is:

Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption—yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005—twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon—about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.

READ THE (WHOLE DEPRESSING) THING

Kudos to ROLLING STONE

Hat Tip: Brother Victor

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/01 at 01:29 PM

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