Ethanol in beklaagdenbankje

Bipartisan common sense is no match for the inertia of a government subsidy.

When Al Gore drops an environmental fad, it has truly reached its expiration date.

In his wisdom, the Goracle recently acknowledged what almost all disinterested observers concluded long ago: Ethanol is a fraud. It has no environmental benefits, and harmful side effects. The subsidies that support its use are an object lesson in the incorrigibility of Washington’s gross special-interest politics. It is the monster that ate America’s corn crop.

“It is not good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” the former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient said, referring to corn-based ethanol. He called the fuel “a mistake,” and confessed one reason he fell so hard for it is that he “had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa.” These farmers vote in the First in the Nation caucuses and practically insist that their favored presidential candidates drink ethanol at breakfast and hail it as the nectar of the gods. ...

Al Gore’s ethanol apostasy is a symptom of a left-right coalition that has arisen to expose the former wonder fuel. (The Gore of old insisted that “the more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely used product, the better off our farmers and our environment will be.”) But common sense, even cross-ideological, bipartisan common sense with all the evidence on its side, is no match for Congress’s boundless appetite for expensive favors for powerful lobbies and constituent groups.

During the past decade, ethanol enjoyed a good run as a notional part of the solution to global warming. Then, environmentalists began to realize it may actually increase greenhouse emissions. Ethanol releases less carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline. Once the emissions necessary to convert land to corn production and then grow and process it are taken into account, though, ethanol doesn’t look so green anymore.

Here is some food for thought: The amount of grain needed to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol just once can feed one person for an entire year.

Another hard-hitting fact: The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels, as stated in an article on Food Freedom’s website.

Still think the federal government’s mandate of ethanol in vehicles is a good idea?

Not only is the federal government’s insatiable appetite for ethanol causing a world food crisis, it has proved itself to be an uneconomical form of energy. An article in the National Review points out, “Ethanol is so uneconomical that Congress supports it three different ways — with a mandate for its use, a tax credit to subsidize it, and a tariff to keep out competitors. Rarely are so many levers of government used to prop up one woeful product.”

Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG), is concerned about the apparent disregard the federal government, especially the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has for the crisis it is causing by enforcing these ethanol mandates.

“The ethanol subsidy, and the mandates imposed by the EPA, has had the adverse impact of driving up the cost of corn,” he says. “In 2008, food aid budgets were brought to the brink, and food riots broke out in the Third World, because corn got so expensive.”

With 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop now devoted to the government-created demand for ethanol, it is no wonder parts of the world are in upheaval.