Energy, the Economy and Ethanol
The Energy Legislation that has been finally hammered out and is due to be pushed through both the Senate and the House is both a success and a failure. It’s about time that Members of Congress realized that just because higher MPG standards for cars might hurt folks in certain voting districts, that overall, for the good of everyone, it’s time they became reality. And this legislation does it. New fuel economy rules raise the fleet standard to an average of 35mpg by 2020.
The bad news? Congress is ignoring the fact that Biofuels are unsustainable and will bankrupt the US economy by tying the price of food to the price of fuel, which is, by the way, already happening. And this legislation includes a huge push toward biofuels, ignoring the fact that our tax dollars would be better spent on other alternatives that would be much more helpful, such as battery research that would aid both energy storage (solar and wind) and energy deployment (electric cars and mass electric transportation.) So though our congresspeople have resisted the Detroit lobbyists on this legislation, they’ve fallen prey to the Big Agribusiness lobbyists instead. “It contains not only the fuel-economy rules, which will alter the American auto fleet, but will divert vast tracts of farmland to produce ethanol and other renewable fuels and bring a bonanza for solar and wind power.”
We all need to understand something here. Right here and now in the US we have roughly the same amount of farmland in cultivation as we did in 1900, and with acreage being lost to suburban sprawl every day, but we now have three times the population. Can anyone explain how taking farmland away from food production and putting it into ethanol production is a good idea? The $100 loaf of bread won’t be far off if we continue to do this, and in fact food prices have risen in the last few years at a higher rate than was the case before the big ethanol push started. There isn’t enough LAND to replace our current consumption of fossil fuel with biofuels. And that’s a simple fact that no one can legislate out of existence. Big Agribusiness, however, can get rich off the subsidies by selling the lie.
Meanwhile Wall Street keeps talking as if this is just a little economic bump in the road that the Fed can fix. Why is it that no one understands that if we continue to “grow” we may very well OUTGROW the resources of the planet we live on? Keeping credit cheap and the marketing message to the fore is tunnel vision at its most myopic.
Technorati Tags: Energy, Economy, Ethanol, Biofuels, Peak Oil
