Posted on 11/11/2010 8:16:36 AM PST by MichCapCon
When the Republican majority is seated in the House of Representatives this January, many have high expectations that they will cut government spending as many of the candidates promised on the campaign trail. But the tricky question now is: Where to cut?
Some energy and environmental experts say they should begin with energy subsidies; specifically for ethanol.
Ethanol is a biofuel made mostly from corn in North America and can be used as an additive to gasoline. In many states, there is a mandated 10% blend with gasoline; the idea being to lower the amount of oil needed.
But many experts say this doesn't work.
"Contrary to popular belief, ethanol fuel does little or nothing to increase our energy security or stabilize fuel prices," wrote Kenneth Green, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Instead, it will increase greenhouse gas emissions, local air pollutant emissions, fresh water scarcity, water pollution (both riparian and oceanic), land and ecosystem consumption, and food prices."...
(Excerpt) Read more at michigancapitolconfidential.com ...
It’s actually worse. Corn is converted into foo, wood isn’t.
The feds (EPA) in many areas already ban wood for home heating. With alternative fuels (oil, natural gas, coal, electric) increasingly unaffordable and more people falling from the rolls of the employed, this measure leaves many people with no access to heating during the winter.
Incidentally, wood-burning power plants do exist in those areas with an intense lumber industry, which yet persists only where big government hasn’t found an excuse yet to ban lumbering.
ethanol exists for socialist farmers and their overlords... it causes harm to any engine that consumes it and it damages our ecology only slightly less that it harms our economy.
LLS
I actually work for a company that is trying to make ethanol from pine. We have made methanol and will make ethanol soon. It is experimental and I am not sure about its viability.
Live by the market-distorting government subsidy, die by it!
The problem is that combining Ethanol with gasoline deprives you of all the uses for pure Ethanol:
1) Alcohol lanterns & cooking-stoves
2) Disinfectant
3) Human consumption
4) As a money* item
*’Money’ being an easily transportable, easily dividable, valued substance enabling trade.
It should be illegal to blend ethanol, should be considered fraud. Existing merchantability laws already cover this.
or HUD, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, HHS, and the EPA...
Ethanol is nothing but a FARM SUBSIDY
It really is that.
But I disagree with the arguments in this thread or elsewhere concerning food prices. The entire corn industry, ethanol or its food derivatives, is a major part of agricultural subsidies which are simply misguided, to be diplomatic, and politically corrupt to be more correct.
In the food arena it's not like Americans don't consume enough food (especially meat); one only has to wander around the local mall and observe the obesity to see that. Or examine every label in the food market to see the ridiculous saturation with corn starch, corn syrup, etc. The point being that government propping of the corn industry, and a host of other agricultural pathways, is simply nonsensical; and can be cut drastically.
Furthermore, for those who bemoan the demise of the family farm, the Agricultural Bill is primarily a corporate subsidy of big conglomerates, little different than taxpayer largess to General Motors or Goldman Sachs.
The federal Agriculture complex is every bit as ripe for gutting as Education, HUD, and HHS. Decent food, its availability, its value, would not be a problem if federal agricultural subsidy was cut fifty percent or more; there are a multitude of more wholesome and efficient pathways than the government now promulgates. You can just bet there would be a lot of (agricultural) industry whining and repetition from Media sycophants who have never seen a farm.
Just another abyss of government interdiction with our tax money. But a far less recognized one.
Johnny Suntrade
Finally!
Few?
Name one?
Aside from whiskey, of course...
The problem, of course, is the EPA which has even declared breath a pollutant.
Get the EPA and its political commissar, Carol "Director of Socialists International" Browner, in front of a House commission.
Ethanol subsidies are the result of EPA mandates/vehicle milage. I suppose the state extortion comes through the transportation department threat to withold highway funds if the state does not require ethanol blends.
yitbos
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