Global warming’s casualty: “They burn food don’t they?”

The climate cult owns the fact that billions of tons of food have been wasted in a Quixotic quest to save the world from non-existent global warming threat

Photo Credit| Wikimedia Commons

Back in the late sixties there was one of those dark artistic “deep” meaning movies which were so popular at the time with the somewhat ominous tile, “They shoot horses don’t they?” The plot is somewhat long, involved and depressing but the reason for the title becomes clear at the very end of the movie when one of the main characters is asked why he assisted in the suicide of his marathon dance partner. His answer is the title of the film. He meant of course that when a horse is suffering it is shot to put it out of its misery.

This is how I think of the ethanol connection to global warming. Believing that the planet Earth, Gaia for the more artistic minded, is in misery due to global warming, the well-meaning stars of our drama choose to put it out of its misery by burning the world’s food supply. This for all practical purposes is assisted suicide. “They burn food don’t they?”

But it is worse than that, it always is.

Perhaps the only thing stupider than paying farmers not to grow crops is paying farmers to grow food crops to burn as fuel. Not that you can really blame farmers for lobbying to keep ethanol mandates in place, it certainly helps keep farms profitable. But if your goal is to “help” mankind which would be a better strategy, continue to force refiners to blend food crops in their fuel mixes, or purchase the crops and send them to the impoverished people of the world?

The political left is always railing against spending money for defense or wars. Remember the often repeated anti-war theme during the second Iraq war, “No blood for oil?” As it turned out the United States never did get any of that oil that everyone was so concerned about. Where is the concern about the direct waste in burning food for fuel, how about a new chant “No food for fuel!”

Actually many environmentalist have come to the realization that ethanol along with many other bio-fuels are not the panacea they at one time believed it would be. It is an active debate whether ethanol is a net positive or net negative for the environment but what is not a close call however is the fact that worldwide large areas of land which could be growing food crops instead are being used to grow crops to be burnt as fuel.

Worse yet, this fuel additive is more expensive than the gasoline it replaces. In the United States alone forty percent of all corn grown is now used for ethanol production. An ideology which is constantly making the claim that the poor will be most affected by climate change and uses this as a means to foster guilt on society, is itself responsible for policies that severely punish the poor.

It is easy now to claim that “special interest” and “Big Agriculture” are responsible for maintaining this irrational misuse of resources but this like so many other wasteful and illogical issues that society faces today are the direct result of the global warming scam

Read entire article at BBN

Relax biofuel laws says World Bank as millions face food poverty

FROM-Green Car Web Site

The World Bank is calling on Governments around the world to relax laws requiring biofuels to be mixed with conventional fuels for road transport use as global food prices remain volatile.

According to the organisation, rising food and fuel prices is causing unrest in some of the world’s poorest countries as more people face being pushed below the $1.25 daily income extreme poverty line.

Driven in part by higher fuel costs connected to events in the Middle East and North Africa, global food prices are 36 per cent above their levels a year ago new World Bank Group numbers released this week reveal.

The bank is calling on governments to divert more crop production away from biofuel use and ease export controls to prevent even more people falling below the extreme poverty line.

“More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and volatile food prices,” said World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick. “We have to put food first and protect the poor and vulnerable, who spend most of their money on food.”

The World Bank says that a further 10 per cent increase in global food prices would push a further 10 million people below this line. This is in addition to the 44 million people who have been driven into poverty since last June as a result of price spikes. The World Bank estimates there are now about 1.2 billion people living below the poverty line.

The World Bank’s food price index, which measures global prices remains close to its 2008 peak. While not suggesting that biofuel laws should be abolished altogether, the organisation is concerned that many of the greatest food price increases link to plants commonly used as biofuel sources. Crops such as maize show a 74 per cent increase in price, while other biofuel crops such as wheat show a 69 per cent increase and soybeans show a 36 per cent increase, although rice prices have been stable.

Food prices have soared due to severe weather events in key grain exporting countries, export restrictions and low global stocks as well as biofuel production. The food price hike is also linked to surging fuel prices – crude oil increased 21 per cent in the first quarter of 2011as a result of unrest in the Middle East and North Africa.

In Europe, the European Renewable Energy Directive states that 10 per cent of transport fuel must come from renewable sources by 2020. In the UK a similar measure requires 5 per cent of transport fuel to come from renewable sources by 2013-much of this is currently met through the use of biofuels.

Real Man Made Disasters

FROM-Food Ingredients First

Grocery Manufacturers Association Calls for US Reform of Biofuel Policies

Summary:The same factors that caused a ‘perfect storm’ for commodity prices in 2008 are once again contributing to rising food and food ingredient prices, including strong global demand, poor weather, rising energy costs, commodity speculation, and trade restrictions.

4/15/2011 --- Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) Vice President for Federal Affairs Scott Faber testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works regarding federal biofuels policies.

“The same factors that caused a ‘perfect storm’ for commodity prices in 2008 are once again contributing to rising food and food ingredient prices, including strong global demand, poor weather, rising energy costs, commodity speculation, and trade restrictions. However, one difference between 2008 and 2011 is that even more of our food and feed is being diverted to produce fuel.

“Today, nearly 40 percent of U.S. corn production is diverted from food and feed to produce more than 13 billion gallons of corn ethanol. Many experts have confirmed the link between corn ethanol and higher commodity prices, including researchers at the Congressional Budget Office and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“We urge Congress to freeze the amount of corn ethanol that must be blended into gasoline to provide advanced fuels more time to reach commercial scale. In addition, Congress should immediately end the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) and instead invest in advanced fuels. Congress should reject proposals to redirect the VEETC to corn ethanol infrastructure and instead invest in advanced fuels that that do not pit our energy security needs against our food security needs.

“The time is now for Congress to reform federal biofuels policies.”

Biofuel policy is causing starvation, says Nestlé boss

FROM-UK Independent

By Stephen Foley in New York


Soaring food inflation is the result of "immoral" policies in the US which divert crops for use in the production of biofuels instead of food, according to the chairman of one of the world's largest food companies.


Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, lashed out at the Obama administration for promoting the use of ethanol made from corn, at the expense of hundreds of millions of people struggling to afford everyday basics made from the crop.

Mr Brabeck-Letmathe weighed in to the increasingly acrimonious debate over food price inflation to condemn politicians around the world who seem determined to blame financial speculators instead of tackling underlying imbalances in supply and demand. And he reserved especially pointed remarks for US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, who he said was making "absolutely flabbergasting" claims for the country's ability to cope with rising domestic and global demand for corn.

"Today, 35 per cent of US corn goes into biofuel," the Nestlé chairman told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York yesterday. "From an environmental point of view this is a nonsense, but more so when we are running out of food in the rest of the world.

"It is absolutely immoral to push hundreds of millions of people into hunger and into extreme poverty because of such a policy, so I think – I insist – no food for fuel."

Corn prices almost doubled in the year to February, though they have fallen from their peak in the pastfew weeks. Anger at rising food prices contributed to protests across the Middle East, and rising commodities costs were among the factors pushing UK inflation to 4.4 per cent in February, according to figures out yesterday.

US exports account for about 60 per cent of the world's corn supply. Demand has surged as more people join the middle classes in emerging economies such as China and India, not just because these new consumers demand more food made from corn, but also because demand for meat has increased and livestock farmers need to buy more feed.

Nestlé, the company behind Shredded Wheat, Nescafé and Aero chocolate bars, has been lobbying European regulators and governments around the world against setting high targets for biofuel use, even though many countries see the production of ethanol as a means of meeting obligations to cut carbon fuel emissions.

The lobbying has fallen on deaf ears in the US, however. Ethanol production from corn is heavily subsidised, with output running at more than 13.5 billion gallons annually. Policies to promote its production are "absurd", Mr Brabeck-Letmathe claimed yesterday, and meeting a mooted global target of having 20 per cent of fuel demand with biofuels would involve increasing production by one third.

"What is the result? Prices are going up. It's not very complicated," he said. "This question is now the number one priority for the G20 meeting in Nice, and the main thing we are going to do is fight against speculation. We are concentrating on the irrelevant."

Speaking to farmers earlier this month, the Obama administration's agriculture secretary said he found arguments from the like of Nestlé "irritating". Mr Vilsack said: "The folks advancing this argument either do not understand or do not accept the notion that our farmers are as productive and smart and innovative and creative enough to meet the needs of food and fuel and feed and export."

Mr Brabeck-Letmathe was chief executive as well as chairman of Nestlé until splitting the roles in 2008. He is also on the board of luxury goods maker L'Oréal, the investment bank Credit Suisse and oil company ExxonMobil. Speaking at the CFR yesterday, he also advocated the idea of setting a price for water used in agriculture, as a means of more efficiently allocating scarce resources. And he suggested that alternative sources for biofuels could be algae and stems of harvested corn.

‘Absolute madness’ of biofuels

FROM-Washington Times

By Robert Bryce

Last month, Peter Brabeck, the chairman of the Swiss food giant Nestle, declared that using food crops to make biofuels was "absolute madness."

The epicenter of that madness is the U.S. corn-ethanol sector. This year, it will consume 40 percent of all U.S. corn - that's about 15 percent of global corn production or 5 percent of all global grain - in order to produce a volume of motor fuel with the energy equivalent of about 0.6 percent of global oil needs.

Congress lavishes about $7 billion in annual subsidies, mandates and tariff protections upon an industry that is helping push global food prices to all-time highs and shrink grain reserves at the very same time that global grain production is faltering and protests over food prices are becoming common.

The quantity of grain to be consumed this year for ethanol production - 4.9 billion bushels - boggles the mind. That's more than twice as much as all the corn produced in Brazil and more than six times as much as is grown in India. Put another way, that's more corn than the output of the European Union, Mexico, Argentina and India combined.

Despite these facts, President Obama said last month in his State of the Union speech, "We can break our dependence on oil with biofuels." Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, who is considering a run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, was in Iowa recently, cravenly wooing the ethanol producers and slamming "big city" critics of the ethanol industry. Alas, there's little reason to expect much bravery out of Mr. Gingrich's fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. Current Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, recently told reporters not to expect cuts to the ethanol subsidies because they are "not in the discretionary spending pot."

While Mr. Obama prevaricates and Congress dithers, ethanol boosters are once again claiming that their sector has negligible effect on grain prices. However, the events of the past few weeks - corn futures at near-record highs and social unrest related to food prices - are nearly identical to the mayhem that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Back then, more than a dozen studies, including ones by Purdue University, the World Bank and the Congressional Research Service, exposed the link between increasing ethanol production and higher food prices. Soaring food prices led to violent protests in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia. Worries about adequate food stocks led several countries to ban food exports.

In May 2008, the Rand Corp. warned that diverting corn to the ethanol sector was not only bad economics, but a security threat: "Using corn for ethanol is economically inefficient and has harmed U.S. national security. Diverting corn from food to ethanol production has pushed up world market prices for grains and other foods, which, in 2008, resulted in riots in a number of developing countries."

In recent weeks, we've seen food price increases and protests that are reminiscent of 2008. There have been food riots in Algeria and Mozambique. Last month, about 8,000 Jordanians protested in the streets of Amman and other cities over rising food prices. In Egypt, the world's biggest wheat importer, wheat prices are up by 30 percent over the past 12 months. Those higher wheat prices are being stoked by rising corn prices, which have doubled over the past six months and are at about $7 per bushel. "Higher corn prices always means higher wheat prices," says Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, an Omaha-based commodity consulting firm.

In December, a study by two U.S. agriculture economists, Thomas Elam and Steve Meyer, found that corn prices are being directly stoked by demand from the ethanol sector. Mr. Elam and Mr. Meyer, who have done consulting work for the meat industry, found that without the ethanol mandates, the average price of corn would be lower by more than $2 per bushel. They also conclude that "biofuels policy has caused significant cost increases for all users of feedgrains."

David Orden, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, told me that surging corn prices are "a continuation of what happened in 2008." The push for biofuels, he said, "has clearly tightened up agricultural commodity markets. That's good for farmers, but it is not good for poor people around the world."

Many of those poor live in the United States. Some 43.6 million Americans, about 14 percent of the population, are receiving federal food stamps. Since October 2008, the number of Americans relying on food stamps jumped by 41.5 percent, and enrollment in the program has increased for 26 consecutive months. And thanks to the ethanol scam, those many millions are being priced out of the meat aisle. Over the past year, beef prices have risen more than 6 percent, and pork prices are up 11 percent. Economists are expecting overall grocery prices in the United States to rise by about 5 percent this year.

But the real - and likely more dangerous - food-price increases will happen outside of this country. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projected that global grain prices are likely to be as much as 40 percent higher by 2020, and a London-based nonprofit entity, ActionAid, predicted that some 600 million more people could be left hungry by 2020 because of increased production of biofuels.

Mr. Brabeck, the chairman of Nestle, the world's biggest food company, has rightly put the spotlight on the biofuels madness. As the head of a company with $100 billion in annual food-related revenues, Mr. Brabeck clearly has a keen understanding of the global food industry. And last month during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he identified the stunningly obvious solution to the ongoing insanity. "No food for fuel," he said.

It's time - no, it's long past time - to heed Mr. Brabeck's advice. "No food for fuel" should be the mantra on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations. In addition, it should be a required oath for all of the candidates (Mr. Gingrich in particular) who are planning to campaign in Iowa for the 2012 presidential election.

Stop the madness.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future" (PublicAffairs, 2010).

Sanity slowly returning to global warming policy

EDITORIAL FROM-Washington Examiner

Somebody should check the water Gunter Oettinger is drinking because it must contain something that restores common sense in critically important public policy discussions. Oettinger is the European Union's energy commissioner and, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, he has dashed hopes of Big Green environmentalists worldwide with these words: "If we go alone to 30 percent, you will only have a faster process of deindustrialisation in Europe. I think we need industry in Europe, we need industry in the U.K., and industry means CO2 emissions." He was referring to proposals that the EU increase its current carbon monoxide emissions reduction goal from 20 percent to 30 percent. Oettinger predicted that what is left of European industry would flee the continent and move to Asia if that happens. The net result would be loss of jobs and economic vitality in Europe and quite possibly even more emissions because Asian countries will not impose such draconian reductions on industry.

Meanwhile, here in America, the Department of Agriculture reported this week that corn reserves are at their lowest level in nearly two decades. Federal officials, according to the New York Times, say the reserves are down because ethanol producers are buying corn as fast as possible in anticipation of a federal policy allowing the amount of corn-based fuel mixed with gasoline to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent. The price of a bushel of corn has doubled in the face of that demand, going from $3.50 a bushel to more than $7 a bushel, which drives up food prices more generally. "The price of corn affects most food products in supermarkets. It is used to feed the cattle, hogs and chickens that fill the meat case, and is the main ingredient in Cap'n Crunch in the cereal aisle and Doritos in the snack aisle. Turned into corn sweetener, it sweetens most soft drinks," the Times reported. There was no indication in the Times story that those same federal officials will do anything about this situation, but at least they recognize the connection between rising food prices and increasing ethanol production.

Rising corn prices in the United States are mirrored worldwide, thanks to growing demand for biofuels in response to mandates from government officials concerned about "being green." The same thing happened in 2008, but the experts dismissed it as a product of an extremely rare convergence of factors that won't likely be repeated any time soon. But, as Princeton University's Tim Searchinger wrote in The Washington Post, "this 'perfect storm' has re-formed not three years later. We should recognize the ways in which biofuels are driving it." Thus, we are reminded of the Law of Unintended Consequences. American policymakers would do well to stop listening to environmental ideologues and start drinking from the same fountain of common sense that clarified Oettinger's thinking.

Green-energy plant sucks up subsidies, then goes bust

FROM-Washington Examiner


 Timothy P. Carney

To turn wood chips into ethanol fuel, George W. Bush's Department of Energy in February 2007 announced a $76 million grant to Range Fuels for a cutting-edge refinery. A few months later, the refinery opened in the piney woods of Treutlen County, Ga., as the taxpayers of Georgia piled on another $6 million. In 2008, the ethanol plant was the first beneficiary of the Biorefinery Assistance Program, pocketing a loan for $80 million guaranteed by the U.S. taxpayers.
Last month, the refinery closed down, having failed to squeeze even a drop of ethanol out of its pine chips.

The Soperton, Ga., ethanol plant is another blemish on ethanol's already tarnished image, but more broadly, it is cautionary tale about the elusive nature of "green jobs" and the folly of the government's efforts at "investing" -- as President Obama puts it -- in new technologies.

Late in the Bush administration, corn-based ethanol started to get a bad rap. Corn for ethanol was crowding out other crops, and food prices were soaring. Mexicans rioted as tortilla prices spiked. So Bush started talking up "advanced biofuels" including "cellulosic ethanol": roughly, ethanol distilled from plants that were not also food products. Bush mentioned wood chips and switchgrass in two consecutive State of the Union addresses

Georgia politicians saw an opportunity here. "The Saudi Arabia of Pine Trees" became an unofficial state motto among Peach State politicians, and Gov. Sonny Perdue declared, "I'm confident the bioenergy industry and sector is going to be a cornerstone of the new Georgia."

Amid all this hopeful talk by politicians, there were naysayers among the scientists. One Nobel Prize-winning physicist talked to the New York Times about these startups trying to turn logging waste into fuel. "You have to look at starts with a grain of salt, especially starts where they say, 'It's around the corner, and by the way, can you pay half the bill?' "

But that same scientist, Steven Chu, is now the secretary of energy, and his Energy Department has recently offered a loan guarantee of as much as $1 billion to a Texas company looking to squeeze fuel out of wood.

The Texas company, KiOR, isn't trying to produce ethanol and methanol as Range Fuels is doing in Soperton. KiOR's end product would be synthetic crude oil, which can do everything ethanol can do (except spike a punch) and much more. This could be part of why the Soperton plant is having trouble finding new investors: Why turn wood chips into white lightning when you can turn them into black gold?

If KiOR's efforts produce a useful fuel, politicians will take credit. But the fact that it has apparently supplanted subsidized wood-to-ethanol makes you wonder what will supplant wood-to-crude before it ever gets to market.

More to the point, how much private investment capital has been dragged to useless fuels because of the promise of subsidies? Range Fuels alone attracted more than $100 million in private investment. Without subsidies, that money would have gone to projects whose promise was not taxpayer money but market demand -- that is, somewhere useful. Our "green" subsidies could be postponing the day we get an alternative to foreign oil.

Range Fuels is a politically connected, mostly through its founder, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla has given more the $350,000 to federal candidates and campaign committees in recent years, a vast majority going to Democrats. In his home state of California, Khosla has famously and openly bankrolled ballot measures to direct state funding to his own "green" ventures or use regulation to make his investments more valuable.

Range Fuels' lobbying budget is small, having spent only about $50,000 over the past three years. Their lobbyists have been former top staffers for powerful Democratic Sens. Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, and Max Baucus.

Despite these Democratic ties, it's been Republicans who have lathered the subsidies on Soperton and celebrated them -- Gov. Perdue, President Bush, Sens. Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss. On the GOP side, Range Fuels' most politically connected asset may be the aptly named Pat Wood. Wood is a revolving-door veteran -- he's the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, having won that job on the recommendation of then-Enron Chairman Ken Lay.

Just as Enron sucked up subsidies before collapsing, the wood-to-ethanol project in Georgia is yet another dog in Uncle Sam's "investment" portfolio.

STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media



FROM-Chicago Tibune


End the binge

Aid to ethanol has gone on too long.

"I'm Al Gore, and I'm an alcoholic." No, that's not exactly how the former vice president began his recent mea culpa on alternative energy. But he admitted he had an unwise dependence on alcohol—corn-based ethanol as an ingredient in auto fuel, to be precise—and tried to steer others from the same course.

Gore's dependence was not physiological but political. He backed federal support of the industry as a member of Congress because he wanted to win the votes of farmers in his home state of Tennessee and, when he ran for president, in Iowa. "It is not good policy to have these massive subsidies," he says, now that he no longer aspires to elected office.

Maybe his admission has started something. Even many current politicians are swearing off the stuff.

It's not every day that California Democrat Barbara Boxer, one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate, joins forces with Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, one of the most conservative. But they and 15 other senators signed a letter calling the existing 45-cent-per-gallon federal subsidy to ethanol fuel and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol "fiscally irresponsible and environmentally unwise." They oppose renewal of the two programs, which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.

Yet there's talk that an extension of the subsidy, and even a boost in the tariff, could be included in the tax deal reached by President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. That would be a terrible mistake.

The fiscal tab of the federal tax credit comes to about $6 billion a year, which is more than the entire savings from President Obama's two-year freeze on federal civilian pay. The more dire our fiscal predicament grows, the harder it is to justify this special-interest expense.

Then there are the environmental questions. Ethanol is actually worse than ordinary gasoline when it comes to some pollutants. True, it does generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions — but that savings could be canceled out if forests are cut down to expand corn production, because trees absorb so much carbon dioxide. Some estimates also suggest it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than the gallon contains, making the whole exercise pointless.

The excuse for this favor to corn farmers and ethanol producers is that it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. But the effect is modest at best. In 1997, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office) said that "ethanol's potential for substituting for petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect overall energy security."

If reducing our reliance on foreign oil producers were truly the goal of federal policy, the government wouldn't be so intent on keeping out foreign ethanol. The high duty on imported ethanol, noted the 17 senators, "discourages transportation fuel imports from Brazil, India, Australia and other sugar producing countries, and leads to more oil and gasoline imports."

In better fiscal times, it was easier to excuse our leaders for having their fun doling out subsidies for ethanol and protecting its makers from competition. But it's time for the party to end.

You Can Stop Paying for Al Gore's Mistake

FROM-RCP


By Debra Saunders

In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.

Sure, he meant well, but as Reuters reported, Gore also said, "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

In sum, Gore demonstrated that politicians are lousy at figuring out which alternative fuels make the most sense. Now even enviros like Friends of the Earth have come to believe that "large-scale agro-fuels" are "ecologically unsustainable and inefficient." That's a polite way of saying that producers need to burn through a boatload of fossil fuels to make ethanol.

Gore also showed that most D.C. politicians can't be trusted to put America's interests before those of Iowa farmers. But there is one pursuit in which homo electus excels: spending other people's money.

Beware politicians when they promise you "the jobs of the future." Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about a federal grant program in Florida designed to retrain the unemployed for jobs in the growing clean-energy sector. Except clean tech isn't growing as promised. Officials told the Post that three-quarters of their first 100 graduates haven't had a single job offer.

In May, President Obama came to a Fremont, Calif., solar plant where he announced, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra." This month, Solyndra announced it was canceling its expansion plans. The announcement came after voters rewarded the green lobby by defeating Proposition 23 -- which would have postponed California's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law AB32 -- because voters bought the green-jobs promise.

Back to Gore. There is a movement in Washington to end Gore's mistake. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have proposed ending the 45-cent-per-gallon subsidy on corn ethanol, which is set to expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress extends it.

As DeMint explained in an e-mail to the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, "Government mandates and tax subsidies for ethanol have led to decreased gas mileage, adversely effected the environment and increased food prices. Washington must stop picking winners and losers in the market, and instead allow Americans to make choices for themselves."

That's what free-market types who oppose corporate welfare -- like me -- have been saying for years.

So the question is: Will this new batch of Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to buck the farm lobby and agribusiness by weaning them from the public teat? Or are they no better than the farm-lobby-pandering Al Gore?

Gore's Important Admission

FROM-The American Spectator

 By Andrew Cline

It may not seem like much, but Al Gore's recent admission that ethanol subsidies are bad policy is a really big deal.

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," Reuters reported Gore saying during a green energy summit in Athens. "First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small."

This is hardly likely to change U.S. energy policy overnight. As Gore said, "It's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going." Though that is one more reason to oppose such programs, it is almost beside the point. Gore's admission has much more important implications, namely the revelation of two important truths: 1. Policies to prop up ethanol are environmental frauds; and 2. So is Al Gore.

Al Gore's doomsaying has turned him into the world's famous environmental prophet. He is the sage in the green robe. His words are truth -- undisputable and indispensable. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

"Knowledge," they wrote. And "needed" measures to counteract the change. Until this week, one of those needed measures, according to Gore, was to turn corn into fuel.

"I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress -- at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it," Gore said during a Dec. 1, 1998, speech to a Farm Journal conference. "The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be."

The first part of that statement is true. The second is not.

On Aug. 4, 1994, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save the EPA's ethanol mandate. The fight was between farm state politicians, who wanted to mandate ethanol use, and others who thought methanol would work just as well. Gore broke the tie in favor of the farm state lobby. Though he claimed it was for the planet, Gore's support of ethanol really was to buy the votes of farmers. He admitted as much in Athens:

One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.

Al Gore? Put politics before the planet? Pshaw.

But it is true; he has admitted it.

This is important because Gore's ethanol exploits duplicate the entire global climate change debate in miniature form.

To gain votes, Gore pushed an idea that was widely thought to be environmentally beneficial, but which skeptics claimed was actually the opposite. The Heritage Foundation at least as far back as the early 1980s was warning that ethanol subsidies were bad energy policy. By the mid-1990s, the mandate was being attacked as a sop to the corn lobby that had no environmental benefits. And by the late 2000s, the broadly accepted view had changed entirely. Scientists had come to believe that grain-based biofuels like ethanol were driving up food prices, causing food shortages, and possibly making global warming worse.

Al Gore, though, boasted that ethanol was helping save the planet. From Gore there was no doubt, no uncertainty, no scientific argument. It was his way, the green way, or the path to planetary destruction. There were no other options.

But there were, and the people offering them -- not Al Gore -- were right. And that leads to the obvious question: If the Enviro-Oracle got ethanol wrong, then what else might he have gotten wrong?

The point is not that Gore is entirely wrong. It's that he is wrong enough (remember the errors in An Inconvenient Truth) to merit skepticism. But law doesn't take skeptics' views into account. Environmental regulations compel compliance. Only in the market does the skepticism of the minority become an important player. If Al Gore bases his personal financial investments on faulty science, it matters to no one but Al Gore, and perhaps his wife. But if states base environmental regulations on faulty science he pushed, we are all harmed.

The great ethanol error would've been corrected quickly had the market been left in control. It was only the misguided hand of government that grew this problem to global proportions, and perpetuates it still.

This fall the EPA approved a waiver allowing gasoline to contain up to 15 percent ethanol for cars made since 2007. Congress has mandated that 13.95 billion gallons of renewable fuels (mostly ethanol) be produced in 2011, up from 12.95 billion gallons this year. (Can you imagine how much worse it would be had Gore been president?)

The bottom line is this: If we cannot base our environmental policies on the pronouncements of Al Gore, should we really be passing costly, far-reaching mandates that force people to behave as Al Gore would want them to? Wouldn't it be better to let the market decide, and leave Al Gore to investing heavily in biofuel companies?

Corn Dogs?

 Ethanol subsidies pose early test for the GOP

FROM-Washington Examiner

By: Timothy P. Carney

Republicans talk about ending wasteful government intervention. Congressional Democrats say they want to protect the environment. And Barack Obama claims he's looking for bipartisan cooperation and reform. All of these goals would be served by rolling back ethanol subsidies.

"A Republican takeover of the House of Representatives," Bloomberg News speculated this week, "may mean that U.S. subsidies aiding ethanol producers will be cut after the party pledged to reduce government spending."

We'll find out within months if that's putting too much stake in GOP rhetoric.

Ethanol fuel (especially ethanol distilled from corn) is subsidized in dozens of ways by governments at all levels. Two of the longest-running subsidies -- a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, and 45-cent tax credit for every gallon blended with gasoline -- expire on Dec. 31, making them a top priority for industry lobbyists during the lame-duck session.

The options facing Congress are (a) extend both subsidies for a long period, such as five years, (b) extend them until next year, and then take up some sort of reform, or (c) do nothing and let them expire. If Republicans were serious about their expressed belief in the free market and opposition to subsidies, they would let the subsidies die this year or next. If Democrats were truly concerned about the environment and want to end corporate welfare for big oil, they would, too.

In recent years, Americans have learned about the downsides of ethanol subsidies. The 2005 and 2007 energy bills mandated the use of ethanol, igniting a corn boom, which crowded out other crops, contributing to spikes in food prices. Ethanol was even blamed for tortilla riots in Mexico.

Growing and distilling ethanol uses immense amounts water (contributing to river and aquifer depletion) and energy (some scientists argue that more energy goes into making a gallon of ethanol than is contained in that gallon). The added corn demand means more fertilizer production and use, adding to harmful runoff, which is blamed for "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico that choke out aquatic life.

There are plenty of policy reasons to kill ethanol subsidies, but historically, a powerful lobby has kept them alive. And while the GOP talks about free markets, Republican lawmakers are cozier with the ethanol lobby than Democrats are. Republicans raised more than Democrats from Poet, the nation's largest ethanol maker. Former Republican Rep. Jim Nussle of Iowa is now the president of Growth Energy, a leading pro-ethanol lobby.

Presumptive incoming House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp has long supported ethanol subsidies, as has Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley. Republican coziness with corn growers and ethanol distillers could outweigh sound policy considerations.

Recently, however, academics such as Cornell professor Harry de Gorter have put forward a more potent argument for abolishing the tax credit: The tax credit only subsidizes gasoline consumption.

Start with this statement by the Congressional Budget Office: "In the future, the scheduled rise in mandated volumes would require the production of biofuels in amounts that are probably beyond what the market would produce even if the effects of the tax credits were included."

In other words, the ethanol tax credit won't boost ethanol consumption at all in the future, because the mandate will set demand. So the tax credit will simply subsidize the ethanol that blenders -- that is, oil companies -- would have bought anyway. This boosts profit margins for oil companies, and subsidizes fuel consumption -- thus subsidizing driving.

For this reason, the ethanol industry is actually divided over the tax credit. They would prefer a producer tax credit and other new ethanol subsidies to replace the current ones.

The free-market philosophy expounded by Republicans argues for letting the tax cuts expire, and not creating any new carveouts or handouts -- eventually abolishing the costly mandates. The lobbyist connections and campaign cash, however, will pull the GOP toward continuing subsidies.

So ethanol becomes a good test for the supposedly reborn Republican Party in both the lame-duck and the 112th Congress. Republicans this year could demand a six-month extension of current policy, and next year, with control of the House, simply kill the tariff and tax credit.

The downsides of ethanol are so clear, and the environmental benefits so dubious, that it's hard to attribute support for the subsidies -- especially by people preaching the free-market gospel -- to anything but obeisance to special interests.

Now we get a chance to see what motivates the GOP

One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show

New analysis of 2009 US Department of Agriculture figures suggests biofuel revolution is impacting on world food supplies

FROM-UK Guardian

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.

The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels.

"The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels," said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis.

Last year 107m tonnes of grain, mostly corn, was grown by US farmers to be blended with petrol. This was nearly twice as much as in 2007, when Bush challenged farmers to increase production by 500% by 2017 to save cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions.

More than 80 new ethanol plants have been built since then, with more expected by 2015, by which time the US will need to produce a further 5bn gallons of ethanol if it is to meet its renewable fuel standard.

According to Brown, the growing demand for US ethanol derived from grains helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008. In 2008, the Guardian revealed a secret World Bank report that concluded that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments had pushed up food prices by 75%, in stark contrast to US claims that prices had risen only 2-3% as a result.

Since then, the number of hungry people in the world has increased to over 1 billion people, according to the UN's World Food programme.

"Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the US federal government in its renewable fuel standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in world hunger. By subsidising the production of ethanol to the tune of some $6bn each year, US taxpayers are in effect subsidising rising food bills at home and around the world," said Brown.

"The worst economic crisis since the great depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, but they still remain well above their long-term average levels."

The US is by far the world's leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In 2008, the UN called for a comprehensive review of biofuel production from food crops.

"There is a direct link between biofuels and food prices. The needs of the hungry must come before the needs of cars," said Meredith Alexander, biofuels campaigner at ActionAid in London. As well as the effect on food, campaigners also argue that many scientists question whether biofuels made from food crops actually save any greenhouse gas emissions.

But ethanol producers deny that their record production means less food. "Continued innovation in ethanol production and agricultural technology means that we don't have to make a false choice between food and fuel. We can more than meet the demand for food and livestock feed while reducing our dependence on foreign oil through the production of homegrown renewable ethanol," said Tom Buis, the chief executive of industry group Growth Energy.

More...

Just around the corner

FROM- New Republic


How Big A Deal Is The Alabama Biofuel Scandal?

In 2007, a tiny Alabama start-up called Cello Energy was running around telling people that it had devised a way to produce cellulosic ethanol at $16 per barrel, using material like hay, switchgrass, and wood chips. Investors perked up and started plunking down millions of dollars for the venture. Cellulosic ethanol, after all, is a promising concept—a low-carbon biofuel that wouldn't have all the problems associated with using corn or soy as feedstock. True, cellulosic ethanol isn't commercial quite yet, but scientists are perennially insisting that it's just around the corner.

Well, turns out the whole thing was too good to be true. Not only were Cello's promises overblown, but an Alabama jury just found the start-up guilty of fraud, ordering the company to by $10.4 million to one of its investors, pulpmaker Parsons & Whittemore. At Earth2Tech, Josie Garthwaite sorts through the court documents and points out that most of Cello's backers, including P&W and noted Silicon Valley venture capitalists Khosla Ventures, didn't really do due diligence on Cello at all. (A lot of venture capitalist are lavishing money on next-generation biofuels, and Khosla is one of the most hyperactive.)

Anyway, if this was just a case of a few investors losing their shirts, it would be mundane news. But there's a policy angle, too. It turns out the EPA may not have done its due diligence, either. The EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard, which is currently being updated, mandates 36 billion gallons worth of biofuel to be produced in the United States by 2022 (up from 9 billion this year). As part of the revised standard, the EPA is expecting 100 million gallons worth of cellulosic ethanol to be produced in 2010. But, as Garthwaite reports, the agency was counting on 70 million of those gallons to come from… Cello Energy. And Cello's not going to get anywhere near that amount—a best-case scenario is about 20 million gallons, assuming the technology even works.

So the EPA basically has two options: either offer up new subsidies to ethanol makers or reassess whether the targets in the revised Renewable Fuel Standard are too ambitious (the EPA's comment period for the updated standard is still ongoing). There's already been a great deal of concern that the frantic push for corn- and soy-based ethanol has been counterproductive from an emissions standpoint—since, if diverting crops for fuel leads to farmers elsewhere cutting down forests for crop land, some types of ethanol may actually be worse for the environment than gasoline. And there are worries that the push to increase the required ethanol blend in gasoline may damage motors or reduce mileage. Add to all that new questions about whether the EPA's targets for next-generation biofuels are unrealistic, too.
More...

Reality Bites

FROM-Seattle Times


Washington should scrap biofuels mandate



THE city of Seattle and King County have abandoned their crop-based biofuels programs. So must Washington state.

The state must rescind its myriad laws requiring public and private use of biofuels. These laws force use of crop-based biofuels — the only biofuels available for mass consumption. Hoping and waiting for so-called "second generation" biofuels is denying the global devastation biofuels are wreaking now.

Overwhelming peer-reviewed, published science shows crop-based biofuels do two things:

• Cause hunger and starvation, affecting hundreds of millions of humans. This why the United Nations has called these biofuels a "crime against humanity."

• Cause rain forest destruction, releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide and greatly worsening our climate crisis.

Whether the crop used for biofuel feedstock is grown in Washington or Canada or Malaysia doesn't matter. The devastation caused is equivalent. The idea of creating a homegrown Washington state biofuels industry is fatally flawed.

"If you use farmland in North America to grow biofuels, you're forcing a farmer somewhere else to clear-cut forest to grow food crops. You've effectively cut down a rain forest," wrote David Tilman in the February 2008 issue of Science. He's the lead author of the study, "Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt."

"We looked at all of the current biofuels that are being made around the world and asked if they were causing native ecosystems to be turned into land that would be used to grow the crop. Essentially, all of them are doing that."

The study found the conversion of natural lands to produce food-crop-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia and the United States releases 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the annual greenhouse-gas reductions these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels.

Tilman's study and many others establish land-use change as the mechanism by which crop-based biofuels greatly worsen climate change. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, King County, the city of Seattle and climate scientists worldwide agree crop-based biofuels force adverse land-use change.

Fleet vehicles at the University of Washington show how current Washington biofuels laws are so harmful and must be rescinded.

Current state law — RCW 43.19.642 — requires state agencies to use 20 percent biodiesel to operate their diesel-powered vessels, vehicles and construction equipment.

This state law is widely ignored or minimally complied with. Washington State Ferries have received a two-year exemption from it. Complying would have cost $8 million extra.

But the University of Washington is already fully complying. It has been forced to burn crop-based biodiesel because that is the only biofuel available. Its diesel fleet vehicles are currently burning B-20, a 20-percent blend of American soy biodiesel made by Cargill. Cargill is the world's largest private corporation, with vast holdings in the rain forests of Southeast Asia and Brazil. It is also protested around the world for its environmental practices.

Last year, One Earth Climate Action group protested UW's use of canola biodiesel made by Imperium. UW was then burning fuel that was 2-percent biodiesel and planning to go to 5 percent. Our protest started direct communications with UW President Mark Emmert and Josh Kavanaugh, director of fleet services.

Kavanaugh agreed to delay the increase because of his concern that biofuels worsened climate change. But this year, state law forced Kavanaugh to increase the amount of crop-based biodiesel his fleet burns by tenfold, to 20-percent biodiesel. State law increased the climate damage from biodiesel used by UW fleet vehicles by a factor of 10.

The governments of the Northwest's biggest city and its most populous county have quit crop-based biofuels. The state of Washington needs to do the same. It needs to scrap its biofuels mandates now.

Duff Badgley was the 2008 gubernatorial candidate for the Green Party. He is the founder of One Earth Climate Action Group.
More...

The New America

I find these headlines emblematic of the disconnect in the New America. The first is synonymous of trying to force an unprofitable product on the marketplace:

Largest US Biodiesel Plant Is For Sale

The nation's largest biodiesel refinery went on the block this week for an undisclosed price after the owner shut down the $70 million facility in the face
of low demand...

Obviously current economic conditions have contributed to the decline of the bio-fuel industry, which is precisely what the economy is supposed to do-weed out the losers in the marketplace. So despite massive government subsidies and mandated usage, this product can not survive normal economic variables. Common sense and economic laws would say that the bio-fuel industry should scale way back or disappear until it is a viable product.

Well at least that is the way things used to work, but not in our Brave New Green World. Now biofuel has been mandated by powers on high (governments) as a necessity to modern life, for what they still have not explained. So we are left with our second headline:

Cornell opens new biofuels laboratory

Why of course we need to invest much more public research money into an energy source that can not survive despite massive infusion of other public monies which can not get it past being a loser. But why not throw good (public) money after bad as the articles first paragraph so proudly proclaims:

Cornell University is the proud new home to a state-of-the-art Biofuels Research Laboratory, lauded as a unique research, educational and economic development facility rolled into one....

I wonder how much government research money was given to Thomas Edison, Henry Ford or countless other inventive entrepreneurs of the past in order to develop products and markets for their inventions? But in this New America we invest our children's money to research products which must be subsidized with our grandchildren's money in order that we may increase our tax burden on products we do not really need.

Then of course there is one final headline in the sad saga of the New America;

Researchers Say Increased Biofuel Resources Production Could Harm Water

A new study by researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas warns that expanded production of crops to produce biofuels could damage water resources. The researchers suggest policy makers take into account what they call the "water footprint" when encouraging biofuel development...

Oh well, welcome to the New America.
More...

Moonshine Madness

Well this ought to help out world hunger.

FROM-Bloomberg

Ethanol Blend Hike May Require Half of U.S. Corn Crop

A proposed increase in ethanol use in gasoline would require planting as much as 111 million acres of corn and using almost half of the crop for the fuel by 2015, according to a study by the U.S. grocery industry.

Boosting the amount of biofuels allowed to be blended in gasoline could make last year’s record corn prices “look like a walk in the park,” Bill Lapp, an agricultural analyst who conducted the study commissioned by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, told reporters today in a teleconference.

The Environmental Protection Agency is considering raising the amount of ethanol that may be blended into standard gasoline from the current 10.2 percent to as much as 15 percent, a move opposed by some environmental groups, automakers and food companies. An increase is backed by trade groups representing biofuels producers including Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Poet LLC. The comment period on the proposal ends July 20.

Assuming acreage increases, Lapp concluded that a 15 percent blend would use 48 percent of the corn crop by 2015 and a 12 percent blend would consume 42 percent.

More...
U.S. corn inventories before the 2010 harvest will fall 28 percent from this year to 1.145 billion bushels, the least in three years, as farmers plant fewer acres and demand improves for food, animal feed and fuel, the Department of Agriculture said in a May 12 report.

Acreage Estimates

The USDA estimates about 85 million acres (34.4 million hectares) were planted with corn earlier this year, which will produce a crop of 12.1 billion bushels. About 34 percent of the harvest will be used to make ethanol, the department said.

Other groups opposed to increasing the so-called “blend wall” for ethanol include the American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation, the National Restaurant Association and the Snack Food Association, all members of a group named Food Before Fuel, which published the study.

Raising the blend wall would be a boon to the biofuels industry, which is struggling amid volatile corn costs and lower fuel demand. At least 10 ethanol companies have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the past year. On May 28, Biofuel Energy Corp. said it received a notice of default from its lenders.

‘Minor’ Impact

Russ Korves, an economic-policy analyst at ProExporter Network, an agricultural consulting and research company, said farmers would meet any increase in demand through greater productivity.

“We would think the impacts would be strictly minor,” Korves said today in Washington. He cited a University of Missouri report released last week that said U.S. corn futures would rise by 4 cents a bushel, and ethanol by 4 cents a gallon, if gasoline contained a 15 percent biofuels blend.

Korves spoke at a news conference in Washington organized by a pro-ethanol group, but on a separate issue than the blend wall.

Tom Buis, the chief executive officer of Growth Energy, a Washington-based alternative-energy trade group, said Lapp’s study represents a new round of food-versus-fuel lobbying to stop the growth of the U.S. biofuels industry.

“Big food manufacturers are trying to stand in the way of this progress,” he said in an e-mailed statement.

Corn futures for July delivery rose 9 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $4.44 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade. The most-active contract has gained 9.1 percent this year, partly on speculation that rain would delay planting of the U.S. crop, cutting seeded acres and curbing yield potential. Still, the price is down

Crazy Corn

FROM- WSJ

Ethanol's Grocery Bill

Two federal studies add up the corn fuel's exorbitant cost.

The Obama Administration is pushing a big expansion in ethanol, including a mandate to increase the share of the corn-based fuel required in gasoline to 15% from 10%. Apparently no one in the Administration has read a pair of new studies, one from its own EPA, that expose ethanol as a bad deal for consumers with little environmental benefit.

The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and an ad valorem tariff of four to seven cents a gallon keep out sugar-based ethanol from Brazil and the Caribbean. The federal 10% blending requirement insures a market for ethanol whether consumers want it or not -- a market Congress has mandated will double to 20.5 billion gallons in 2015.

The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that Americans pay another surcharge for ethanol in higher food prices. CBO estimates that from April 2007 to April 2008 "the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices." Ethanol raises food prices because millions of acres of farmland and three billion bushels of corn were diverted to ethanol from food production. Americans spend about $1.1 trillion a year on food, so in 2007 the ethanol subsidy cost families between $5.5 billion and $8.8 billion in higher grocery bills.

A second study -- by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Transportation and Air Quality -- explains that the reduction in CO2 emissions from burning ethanol are minimal and maybe negative. Making ethanol requires new land from clearing forest and grasslands that would otherwise sequester carbon emissions. "As with petroleum based fuels," the report concludes: "GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions are associated with the conversion and combustion of bio-fuels and every year they are produced GHG emissions could be released through time if new acres are needed to produce corn or other crops for biofuels."

The EPA study also explores a series of alternative scenarios over 30 to 100 years. In some cases ethanol leads to a net reduction in carbon relative to using gasoline. But many other long-term scenarios observe a net increase in CO2 relative to burning fossil fuels. Ethanol produced in a "basic natural gas fired dry mill" will over a 30-year horizon produce "a 5% increase in GHG emissions compared to petroleum gasoline." When ethanol is produced with coal burning mills, the process "significantly worsens the lifecycle GHG impact of ethanol" creating 34% more greenhouse gases than gasoline does over 30 years.

Both CBO and EPA find that in theory cellulosic ethanol -- from wood chips, grasses and biowaste -- would reduce carbon emissions. However, as CBO emphasizes, "current technologies for producing cellulosic ethanol are not commercially viable." The ethanol lobby is attempting a giant bait-and-switch: Keep claiming that cellulosic ethanol is just around the corner, even as it knows the only current technology to meet federal mandates is corn ethanol (or sugar, if it didn't face an import tariff).

As public policy, ethanol is like the joke about the baseball prospect who is a poor hitter but a bad fielder. It doesn't reduce CO2 but it does cost more. Imagine how many subsidies the Beltway would throw at ethanol if the fuel actually had any benefits.


More...

"it's extraordinary."

"They're trying to hold us accountable in the United States not only for our own carbon dioxide emissions, but for hypothetical international emissions decades into the future, based on decisions by millions of people around the world, it's extraordinary."


FROM- Post-Dispatch
Global warming policies make it harder on soybean farmers

WASHINGTON — Soybean growers are worried that the Obama administration's latest effort to control global warming could threaten the Midwest's biodiesel industry.

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new rules that would factor in damage that American soybean production can inflict in faraway lands like Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.

The rules, proposed last week, mark another step to combat global warming, a problem made worse when carbon-filled forests go up in smoke in order to grow fuel and food.

But the concept of punishing American soy growers for potential damage in foreign countries — or "indirect land usage" — will be hotly debated in Washington in the coming weeks. The biofuels industry argues that the EPA deployed unreliable methods in calculating how much biodiesel and ethanol contribute to climate change.

Two years ago, Congress passed legislation greatly increasing the requirement for using ethanol, made from corn, and biodiesel, made heavily from soy, as a means to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

That was a boon to corn and soy farmers in Missouri and elsewhere. But the nation's Renewable Fuel Standard requires that the alternative fuels reduce pollution to qualify for the government mandate.

The new EPA rules, designed to develop next-generation biofuels, project the emission reductions far into the future. Corn-made ethanol is granted exemptions over the next several years, but the effects on biodiesel could be immediate, industry officials say.More...

Soybean production for fuel requires more land than corn, and its imprint on land use around the world is calculated differently by the EPA. The agency believes that if more U.S.-grown soybeans are used in biodiesel, then other countries will convert more rainforests and other environmentally sensitive land to produce soybeans for food.

The biodiesel industry, already suffering from the recession, lower fuel prices and new European tariffs, this year may produce less than half of 2008's 700-million-gallon output. Many plants have been idled or are producing little now. Missouri has eight biodiesel plants; Illinois has six.

And now, complains Joe Jobe, CEO of the Jefferson City-based National Biodiesel Board, his industry could be left out of the federal mandate to require alternative fuels and thereby become the first in the country to be regulated for greenhouse gas emissions.

Jobe's organization, allied with the St. Louis-based American Soybean Association, plans to aggressively challenge the new rules during the 60-day comment period, which began last week. About half of biodiesel comes from soybeans.

They contend that the EPA based its land use calculations on imprecise modeling and outdated satellite photos of rainforest damage during a period when little biodiesel was made.


"There has sprung up in Washington a cottage industry of self-proclaimed agriculture policy experts who have never set foot on a farm or worked in any capacity in modern agriculture," Jobe said.

The new rules point to a reality long overlooked or simply discounted — that farming, like the economy, is a global proposition governed by cause and effect.

Growing corn and soybeans in the United States for energy changes planting habits not just in the Midwest but around in the world. Studies have found that cultivation of new croplands to fill gaps in the commodities market leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that hold massive amounts of carbon.

In Brazil, farmers and speculators have converted vast tracts of land to soybeans, pushing cattle ranches deeper into pristine Amazon territories. The Brazilian government reported in March that 9,650 square miles of Amazon rainforest had been destroyed or damaged in a one-year period ending last July, a two-thirds increase over the previous year.

In Malaysia, meanwhile, developers are swiftly converting forests into palm oil plantations for vegetable oil.


Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University, co-authored a peer-reviewed study last year concluding that biofuels contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions when land use decisions are factored in.

"It's simple: When you divert food crops for energy, they will be replaced by plowing up new land," he said. "When you divert U.S. soybeans into biodiesel, it might be replaced on the world market by palm oil from Southeast Asia."

A day after the EPA proposed its new rules last week, the soybean industry was making its case on Capitol Hill, arguing that biodiesel reduces pollution when it displaces oil. The EPA, soybean growers said, acted on "faulty assumptions, flawed analysis and misplaced penalties."

A statement from the American Soybean Association asserted that soy biodiesel is the cleanest burning biofuel "and is not responsible for international land use changes."

However, Illinois soybean farmer Phil Corzine acknowledges the connection from the perspective of someone who also grows soybeans on his 1,500 acres in Brazil.

"If you step back and look at it, a lot of what (the EPA) is saying is true. If you use a significant amount of land for biofuels, you're going to force production to Brazil and you're going to have to find new areas to grow it," said Corzine, who farms near Assumption, in south central Illinois.

Still, Jobe of the National Biodiesel Board grows frustrated wondering why his industry has to shoulder the blame.

"They're trying to hold us accountable in the United States not only for our own carbon dioxide emissions, but for hypothetical international emissions decades into the future, based on decisions by millions of people around the world," he said. "It's extraordinary."

Corn by an ear uh...nose

I guess water does not have much of a lobby in Washington.

FROM-WSJ
Picking Winners: Team Obama, Hydrogen Cars, and the Future of Transport

The Obama administration’s about-face on hydrogen cars appears to amount to picking a winner.

The big cuts in the budget for hydrogen cars mark a sharp reversal with the Bush administration. Not that it has stopped auto makers: General Motors, Honda, and Toyota all said they’d press ahead with cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells, Bloomberg reports today.

There is the bigger question: Why is hydrogen a non-starter even as biofuels are getting more love from Team Obama? Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s rationale for killing the hydrogen program fits squarely with the administration’s embrace of pragmatism:

“We’re going to be moving away from hydrogen-fuel cells for vehicles,” Chu said. “We asked ourselves, is it likely in the next 10 or 15, or even 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy? The answer, we felt, was no.”

But doesn’t that apply equally to electric cars, or the hope that massively increasing the use of biofuels will lead to energy independence? And both of those transportation alternative are getting more, not less, funding in the federal budget.

If hydrogen’s murky future is just a question of cost, as Dan Sperling of the University of California’s Institute of Transportation Studies pointed out, the government has an easy remedy to hand: Just channel the billions of dollars a year in biofuel subsidies toward a hydrogen-car infrastructure.

The Obama administration seems to be signaling that in this era of trillion-dollar budget deficits and urgency to change the energy mix, not all new technologies are equal. Some deserve funding and some don’t. In short, the federal government seems to be getting into the business of picking winners.

If past is prologue, that’s not a task the government is well-suited to. And it probably won’t sit well with the oil industry, which doesn’t want the federal government to begin throwing its weight around and backing particular energy sources. Consider the message in the Exxon Mobil ad that ran today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning: “Oil, gas, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar… to fuel the future we need them all.”




More...

Feel better?

Via Planet Gore

FROM-Reason Foundation

Spring Madness on Global Warming

Usually, the unintended consequences of government policy appear in areas other than those that the policy is trying to address. So, for instance, government prohibited alcohol sales to cut booze consumption and a black market in alcohol popped up. Or Schwarzenegger is raising taxes and Golden State residents are beginning an exodus. Or Vermont outlawed roadside billboards to protect its pastoral vistas and large, bizarre sculptures - such a 12-foot, 16-ton gorilla clutching a real Volkswagen Beetle -- materialized adjacent to car dealers.

But when it comes to corn-based ethanol, government subsidies are accelerating the very thing they were supposed to combat: namely global warming. This is the conclusion not of some evil, knevil out-fit funded by the satanic oil industry. No, siree. This is what the saintly, truth-seeking Environmental Protection Agency just found. In a study that is hot off the press, the agency concludes that: "Demand for land on which to grow crops for biofuels can lead to deforestation and destruction of grasslands and wetlands, resulting in substantial global warming pollution."

So what is an administration that is hell-bent on foisting a cap-and-trade tax-and-spend bill that will saddle the country with trillions of dollars in new energy costs to deal with this mother of all environmental threats planning to do? Surely, it will move post haste to put the elimination of these subsidies on a high-speed-rail track in Congress, right? Wrong. That would be lunatic thinking worthy of a simple-minded, utterly credulous ingénue -- not the superior reasoning abilities of the sophisticates in the Obama administration.

Indeed, in the wake of the study, administration officials are taking immediate steps to help boost the biofuels industry. This includes the creation of an interagency task force to come up with ways to use more ethanol and other biofuels in cars and fueling stations. In addition, Energy Secretary Chu announced $786 million in stimulus funds for advanced biofuels and expansion of commercial biorefineries.

In other words, you, dear taxpayer, will pay higher energy prices to slow down global warming. And you will pay higher taxes to speed up global warming. Either way, you will be doing something for global warming.

Feel better?


More...