Cornfed Gas Tanks a mistake . . .
Will the unintended consequences of Nixon’s change in the farm subsidy structures ever go away? We feed it to cattle, resulting in more methane in manure and a more acidic meat, which is ripe for e coli growth and other potential diseases. We feed it to chickens, resulting in eggs with higher levels of bad cholesterol, and the same problems with the chicken meat as with beef. We have some sort of corn syrup or cornmeal in most processed foods we eat. After all, they have to do something with all that corn that Big Agribusiness is being paid by the government to produce. And unfortunately Congress made a bad mess worse by passing the federal excise tax in 1978 that gave corn based ethanol its primary subsidy, worth 51 cents per gallon of ethanol at today’s prices.
According to the New York Times this morning, “In his State of the Union address, President Bush is expected to call for a huge increase in the amount of ethanol that refiners mix with gasoline, probably double the current goal of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.” I reallyreallyreally have a problem with this. During winter months here my gas mileage goes down by about 25% because of the current mixture of corn based ethanol with my gasoline. Now they’re going to force more of it into the mix?
Now, any of you who read my opinions regularly know I’m GreenThinking. So my complaint may come as a surprise to you. But the fact is there are better ways to power cars in a green manner than Corn. Corn is one of the most inefficient types of ethanol, as the NYT states: “the fuel, which yields a third less energy than petroleum-based gasoline . . . still relies on a federal subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to remain competitive.” This means that I pay for that fuel twice. I pay for it at the gas pump and I pay for it in my tax bill. Does anyone else see a problem with this? Why is this money not being spent on REAL programs to decrease our dependence on fossil fuel, instead of a program to keep Bush Supporters in Big Agribusiness rich, at taxpayer expense?
Some analysts, though, believe that politics has already trumped economics. “Once we have a corn-based technology up and running the political system will protect it,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, a board member at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. “We cannot afford to have 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in 2015, and that’s exactly where we are headed.”Mr. Goldstein said that rather than speed up the process of producing more ethanol, Congress should “step back and reflect on the damage we have already done.”
. . . Ethanol’s big breakthrough came over the battle to ban M.T.B.E. After gasoline spills in California revealed that M.T.B.E. could corrode groundwater, the Renewable Fuels Association and the corn growers were among those pushing ethanol as an environmentally safer alternative.
California banned M.T.B.E. in 1999 and requested a waiver from the federal oxygenate standard, arguing it could make a cleaner-burning gasoline without ethanol. President Bush rejected the waiver, spurring an ethanol construction miniboom.
So here we are. And of course Bush is going to do it to us again, right up the cornhole.
Technorati Tags: Ethanol, Bush Energy, Farm Subsidies, Excise Tax, Green Fuel, Oil Alternatives
