The Ehthanol Hoax: Still Going Strong

I posted last year about how ethanol was one big hoax. You can read that blog entry here:

Big Corn And Ethanol Hoax
84rules
March 13, 2008

And you can get information about the side effects here:

Ethanol: The Side Effects
84rules
April 29, 2008

Well, ethanol is still a big hoax and the Obama adminstration thinks that you and I are still dumb enough to fall for it. From the Wall Street Journal:

The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and an ad valorem tariff of four to seven cents a gallon keep out sugar-based ethanol from Brazil and the Caribbean. The federal 10% blending requirement insures a market for ethanol whether consumers want it or not -- a market Congress has mandated will double to 20.5 billion gallons in 2015.

What has happened here is that the Big Corn/Ethanol lobby has successfully conned Congress into giving them a monopoly over the ethanol industry and forced Americans to buy only from this monopoly. (Where are the trust-busters now?)

And then there are the side effects:

The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that Americans pay another surcharge for ethanol in higher food prices. CBO estimates that from April 2007 to April 2008 "the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices." Ethanol raises food prices because millions of acres of farmland and three billion bushels of corn were diverted to ethanol from food production. Americans spend about $1.1 trillion a year on food, so in 2007 the ethanol subsidy cost families between $5.5 billion and $8.8 billion in higher grocery bills.

So, not only are you paying higher gas prices, but you are paying higher food prices as well.

But, many of you out there will say, "We're helping the environment, though!" Not so. Ethanol is having negligible effects, and in many instances, negative effects.

A second study -- by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Transportation and Air Quality -- explains that the reduction in CO2 emissions from burning ethanol are minimal and maybe negative. Making ethanol requires new land from clearing forest and grasslands that would otherwise sequester carbon emissions. "As with petroleum based fuels," the report concludes: "GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions are associated with the conversion and combustion of bio-fuels and every year they are produced GHG emissions could be released through time if new acres are needed to produce corn or other crops for biofuels." The EPA study also explores a series of alternative scenarios over 30 to 100 years. In some cases ethanol leads to a net reduction in carbon relative to using gasoline. But many other long-term scenarios observe a net increase in CO2 relative to burning fossil fuels. Ethanol produced in a "basic natural gas fired dry mill" will over a 30-year horizon produce "a 5% increase in GHG emissions compared to petroleum gasoline." When ethanol is produced with coal burning mills, the process "significantly worsens the lifecycle GHG impact of ethanol" creating 34% more greenhouse gases than gasoline does over 30 years.

And the parting shot:

As public policy, ethanol is like the joke about the baseball prospect who is a poor hitter but a bad fielder. It doesn't reduce CO2 but it does cost more. Imagine how many subsidies the Beltway would throw at ethanol if the fuel actually had any benefits.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Ethanol's Grocery Bill
Review & Outlook
Wall Street Journal
June 2, 2009