Posted on 05/11/2008 3:15:50 PM PDT by The_Republican
The time has come for Congress to rethink ethanol, an alternative fuel that has lately fallen from favor. Specifically, it is time to end an outdated tax break for corn ethanol and to call a timeout in the fivefold increase in ethanol production mandated in the 2007 energy bill.
This does not mean that Congress should give up on biofuels as an important part of the effort to reduce the country’s dependency on imported oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What it does mean is that some biofuels are (or are likely to be) better than others, and that Congress should realign its tax and subsidy programs to encourage the good ones. Unlike corn ethanol, those biofuels will not compete for the world’s food supply and will deliver significant reductions in greenhouse gases.
Last year’s energy bill required that 36 billion gallons of biofuels be produced annually by 2022. Of that, 21 billion gallons would be “advanced” biofuels that are still mostly in the experimental stage; the rest would be the corn-based variety beloved by farmers, Midwestern politicians and presidential candidates. This mandate comes on top of a 51-cents-a-gallon subsidy to ethanol blenders enacted when the industry was small and oil prices low.
The industry is no longer small — seven billion gallons and climbing rapidly — and oil is over $120 a barrel, making ethanol not only competitive but a bargain.
Ending the tax subsidy should be easy. Ending the mandate will be tougher, though some members of Congress are showing buyer’s remorse. One reason is the worldwide spike in food prices. That has been driven largely by a huge increase in demand and rising energy costs. The diversion of American corn from food to fuel — about one-fourth of the crop — has not helped.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Good find. Unusually sane and sensible for a NYT editorial.
The next editorial in this logical sequence should be: Rethinking Liberalism.
I don't know what it is, but it will be clean, leave no carbon footprint, cost little, will not affect commodity prices, need no government subsidy, and will be loved by all the children of the world. Imagine a spring time field of wildflowers.
However, until this heavenly source emerges we gotta get off our collective a$$es and exploit the energy technologies we know will work.
Oops. - Seamless 180 degree turn on ethanol while still trying to push the fatally flawed agenda in the same breath.
This does not mean that Congress should give up ...
Yeah. Until the next fiasco resulting from meaningless and ill conceived government intervention into a sector that is working fine without them.
[Somewhere just over the rainbow is a mythical solution to our energy needs. It is only just out of our grasp. I don’t know what it is, but it will be clean, leave no carbon footprint, cost little, will not affect commodity prices, need no government subsidy, and will be loved by all the children of the world. Imagine a spring time field of wildflowers.]
That’s what will happen if the American people are smart enough to elect a Democrat as president this November. On the day after inauguration, the President will reach into the top drawer in his desk in the oval office and take out the magic wand sitting there and then wave it around (Bush was too dumb to know how to use it) and all of the world’s problems will be solved.
But only if a Democrat is elected.
sarcasm off/
Ethanol ping.
Like old Clint Eastwood said in that movie with the ape, Hang on to your ass, Fred. The ethanol plants are beginning to close. Several of them have gone belly up in the last month, and more are expected to.
It will seek its own level.
Rethinking Ethanol??? = DRILL IN ANWR !!
OH NO! I won’t believe it. The Liberal econuts were WRONG!
Gotta hand to those boys, they’re quick on the uptake.
Someone ought to tell them that the guy running in front of the crowd isn’t always a leader. They might be chasing him.
‘Ending the tax subsidy should be easy.’ Does a tin foil hat statement like that really need a comment?
Aw.. let the hungry live on MTBE. The environmentalists and Nytimen have oceans of it left over from THEIR LAST STUPID AIR HEAD MACHINATION!
When are Americans going to make good use of all those beautiful lamp posts?
where they been?
out on the farm we were thinkin’ that two years ago.
Socialism and central planning always fails.
More B.S. from the Arabs and Arabs lovers.
Ethanol is meant to be DRUNK, not put in gas tanks!
First, the bad news about ethanol. Ethanol fires are evidently harder to control than gasoline fires.
Ethanol fires hard to controlHopefully, ways will be found to make controlling ethanol fires easier.
On the brighter side concerning ethanol, there's now evidence that people might get as much, or more, bang per buck for their gas dollars with gas / ethanol mixtures.
Gas-competitive gas / ethanol mixturesAlso, I was surprised by the introduction of a machine for making home-made ethanol.
EFUEL100But watch out for fines for violating biofuel regulations.
Fines for violating biofuel regulationsFinally, I'm also keeping an eye on the development of non-corn ethanol production.
Non-corn ethanol
Not only ethanol, it's also time to rethink the "Manmade Global Warming" hoax.
The NYT has been a major cheerleader in this farce from the get go..
Baloney.
Ask the sick socialist scumbags who write this twaddle what they think about drilling in ANWR or off-shore to "reduce the country’s dependency on imported oil" and then tell me how sensible this NY Slimes editorial is.
I love "famous quotes". They usually leave more questions than answers. For example, who, exactly, does the "judging"?
Rethinking Ethanol??? = DRILL IN ANWR !!
ANWR = a good start.
We have vast reserves of shale oil in Utah & North Dakota, etc.
We have large quantities of nuclear fuel.
We have coal.
I wouldn’t be opposed to wasting a little money on windmills , solar, cow fart capture, whatever, if we would get started on the list above. The only reason for our energy dependency is lack of initiative (or at least not enough to overcome the do-nothings).
IOW, the Iowa caucuses are not for another four years, time to throw Iowa under the bus.
No wonder it been so cold lately! Hell HAS frozen over!
....and Bill Jones is very sad.
It has to do more with 30 years of incompetent Govt policy by the US Govt.
Supply and demand. The world demand for oil has gone up significantly, while the US is doing nothing to either increase it domestic supplies or control it appetite for oil.
Rather then scream the same stupid slogans about “Windfall Profit taxes” and “Investigating the Oil companies” we have been hearing since the 1970s, maybe we should try opening the vast oil production regions of the US we have put off limits and harnessing our own energy sources for a change?
In 1978 we heard all the same things we are hearing out of the Democrats now. “Windfall profit taxes, investigate the oil companies, conserve energy, increase the CAP standards” 30 years later the Democrats are saying the same things in 2008 they were saying in 1978.
The whole reason we created the Dept of Energy in 1978 was to purse these green dogmas. Well it 30 years and trillions of dollars in Govt spending later. Where are we from following the Democrat Party’s siren song on “an Environmentally Sound Energy Policy”?
The reason we are wholly dependent on the variances of the International Oil Market, instead of being one of the nations profiting by them, is because, for “environmental” reasons, we have spent the last 30 years as a matter of Govt policy, doing everything to restrict domestic energy production to in order to push silly “conservation” schemes To blame the speculators for speculating in an Oil market made so ultra profitable for them by stupid US Govt polices is to blame the cart for being pulled by the horse.
WE, the people of the USA via the agency of those idiots we elect and re-elect year after year after year, are to blame not speculators, not the market, not the Fed Reserve and dollar policy. US for not developing our own resources and instead allowing the usual suspects to sing the siren song that we could have all the “Eco green” Govt polices we felt like but would never have to pay any economic prices for those stupidities.
Yeah, but they're a little late to the game -- Washington Post and even the Boston Globe have them beat by a month or so! ;-)
There, fixed it.
I'm sorry, but not hardly. It is typical liberal tripe, only more rotten and foul and more widely disseminated.
It's a mishmash of illogic and ad hoc invention. Sure, this ill-conceived and unnecesary interference in the market ended in disaster, but next time will be different. It will be more poorly conceived, less necessary and even more disasterous.
Reading it made me laugh out loud. How are liberals ever going to explain the disaster of ethanol? But trust us, national health care and international climate management will work out just peachy. Oh, yeah, and after the stunning successes of public housing and education reform.
Nah... he and his son and law have sold big chunks of stock—about $100 million, IIRC. It’s the poor schmucks he sold to, those buying into “green mutual funds” and such, that will probably be left holding the bag. Poor little suckers just don’t get a seat in the front row like those who help design the trough. ;-)
You’re right on the money! This is just more liberal jibberish leading to more government interference. We should abolish the energy department (right along with the dept of education).
All the billions of dollars poured into the ethanol boondoggle haven’t reduced our dependency on foreign oil by one barrel. All the ethanol program has done is make ADM and some farmers rich.
Any idea whose “famous quote” this is? I know I should know this, but it just skips my mind right now.
You mean to say that the votes of Iowans are for sale? Perish the thought.
Various versions of that quote have been attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Teddy Dostoyevsky, and Harry Truman.
No mention from a single Socialist of the FDR “No Till” Set asides) policies.
Polices enacted to keep prices high.
Which biofuels don't burn carbon dioxide? I suspect that every biofuel out there converts to more CO2 than gasoline and cars need more of it to travel the same miles as gasoline.
Show me one person who is starving because of US ethanol.
Corn, Wheat, and Rice exports are all at record levels. We have increased our supply of grain to the World.
Maybe they’ll “rethink” global warming next...
BTTT!
T"he other reason is a spate of studies suggesting that some biofuels — corn ethanol in particular — could accelerate global warming. Environmentalists had long regarded corn ethanol as at least carbon-neutral, emitting greenhouse gases when burned but absorbing those gases while growing. But rising demand for corn, for fuel and food, can have a profoundly negative effect if it causes farmers to clear previously untouched land, in turn releasing more carbon into the atmosphere"
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