Engineer-Poet
2008-03-22 16:54:36
Quoth Jon:
The market *has* decided that. Until now, crops were laughably cheap, and markets made farming unsustainable but for subsidies. Ethanol came along and increased demand. Yes, the plants are also subsidized, and yes, there are more plants than will be sustainable. But the market will decide that, too.
It is pure Congressional fiat; the market has nothing to do with it. Congress has applied a 51¢/gallon “blender’s credit” (subsidy) and mandated gallon quantities of ethanol to be used; the taxpayer is to be screwed twice, once in lower mileage and again at tax time. If we had a free market in biofuels, very few people would be buying E-85 or even E-10.
The scandal is that we could use ethanol to cut gasoline consumption by 30% in properly designed engines. Used that way, ethanol — even “wet” ethanol at 190 or even 160 proof — would be worth upwards of $5/gallon in saved gasoline. But Congress has decided that we can only buy it in a form we can’t use that way, and enforced waste in a time of scarcity.
