On October 10, 2006, I wrote my first anti-ethanol post for this blog. Since then I've written many more (Technorati lists 20 since October 2007 alone).
Seems like maybe the world is finally starting to agree with me. In an unsigned editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, says there is now a "backlash" against ethanol:
Last week chief economist Joseph Glauber of the USDA, which has been among Big Ethanol's best friends in Washington, blamed biofuels for increasing prices on corn and soybeans. Mr. Glauber also predicted that corn prices will continue their historic rise because of demand from "expanding use for ethanol."
Even the environmental left, which pushed ethanol for decades as an alternative to gasoline, is coming clean. Lester Brown, one of the original eco-Apostles, wrote in the Washington Post that "it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed." We knew for sure the tide had turned when Time magazine's recent cover story, "The Clean Energy Myth," described how turning crops into fuel increases both food prices and atmospheric CO2 [sic]
And it gets worse:
February report in the journal Science found that "corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . . Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%." Princeton's Timothy Searchinger and colleagues at Iowa State, of all places, found that markets for biofuel encourage farmers to level forests and convert wilderness into cropland. This is to replace the land diverted from food to fuel.
And meanwhile ethanol is being subsidized by taxpayer money and is mandated for use in the U.S. while casing food shortages and higher food and gasoline prices.
It's time to take this thing behind the barn and put a bullet in it's brain.
Unfortunately, that's not likely. But there is hope:
[John] McCain and 24 other Senators are now urging EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to consider using his broad waiver authority to eliminate looming biofuel mandates. Otherwise, the law will force us to consume roughly four times the current requirement by 2022.
As I said in October 2006:
Ethanol is simply a transfer program from taxpayer/consumer to farmers who have powerful senators. It steals from taxpayers by subsidizing each gallon with 51 cent per gallon subsidy. It steals from consumers by costing more, providing less energy, driving up the price of corn-based products. Oh, and there's a tariff on foreign ethanol to make sure Iowan farmers don't have to compete for your dollars with farmers in, say, Brazil.
Morally and ethically, it's a legal mugging.
And it still is.
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