Jeanie said: ”Deciding’ is what we’ve done so far, by subsidizing the ethanol industry.”
So what?
I’d rather agribusiness and some Midwestern corn farmers get rich from our fuel purchasing dollars than the Iranian nuclear program, Chavez-ite narco-Marxists, and a vast array of assorted Islamist terrorists.
Our ethanol subsidies and tax breaks total less than $10 billion. And conservatives and “free market” types (especially those who take oil money) go into hysterics.
Meanwhile OPEC, a cartel of socialist klepto-tyrannies, restricts production below market demand by state fiat in order to artificially drive up the price in a huge viciously regressive tax on the productive, humane, and free portions of the world to the tune of trillions.
And the same conservatives yawn.
“And what has that gotten us? Nothing more than higher corn prices that drive a cut-back in the amount of other crops grown.”
WRONG. Factually false.
As ethanol corn production has risen, “food corn” production has NOT fallen but risen as well, as have other staple crops.
Only a minority of US farmland is under cultivation so there is tremendous unused capacity.
Ethanol corn has the starch taken out to make fuel, but the vitamins, minerals, and protein are retained to make animal feed for meat livestock. So it ends up on our plates anyway and that corn would have been needed to be grown for feed anyway.
Only a small portion of the retail price of a box of corn flakes comes from the corn, a huge portion comes from energy. By helping reduce petroleum demand, ethanol helps LOWER food prices.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/in-defense-of-biofuels
Finally, everyone forgets about methanol with an M, which can be made from coal, natural gas, or ANY biomass without exception (TODAY, no further research necessary) such as sewage, trash, or weeds like kudzu.
“It certainly hasn’t gotten us a good alternative fuel.”
Actually alcohol is an EXCELLENT alternative fuel. Unique among alt-fuels, it is “backwards compatible” with the existing legacy fuel (gasoline). No other alt-fuel can say that – if your compressed natural gas, liquid natural gas, diesel, bio-diesel, vegetable oil, hydrogen fuel cell, or hydrogen internal combustion engine car, or electric vehicle runs low on fuel or charge far away from a refueling station that carries your exotic alt-fuel (or a recharge station), you are out of luck.
But a flex-fuel vehicle low on alcohol and far from an alcohol pump can just fill up on gasoline, no problem. That makes the transition easy and painless.
And at $100 FFV tech costs a fraction of what gasoline-electric hybrid tech does (thousands).
Alcohol burns clean, can’t cause Exxon Valdez style disasters, and because its resource base is so wide, can’t have its market “cornered” by an OPEC-like entity so the price will be permanently reasonable.
“Why not let the market develop its own solution?”
Because OPEC controls the market, genius. They have the by far deepest, cheapest, and easiest to extract oil reserves of anyone with an enormous and decisive portion of capacity relative to demand.
We have a huge chicken-and-egg dilemma. Nobody demands alternate fuel capacity in their cars because they see no gas stations with alternate fuel. Gas stations won’t provide that fuel in part because there are so few cars that can use it and thus few potential customers.
We could wait decades for the market to resolve this as it did the cell phone vs. cell phone tower chicken-and-egg dilemma but we are at WAR and Captain Market in dis cape and tights has not yet rescued us.
We ordered Ford to make tanks in WW2; this is a much smaller deal. The total cost is less than what we spent on foreign oil in 5 hours in 2008.
