Ethanol – Granite Grok

The Corn Ethanol and Water Pollution Boondoggle

Climate change activists increasingly target agriculture as a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. Too often, this translates into condemnation of gentle cows or the pleasures of meat-eating instead of drawing attention to proper farming practices and land management. This is especially true with respect to water use and the ethanol industry. Water … Read more

corn cornfield original Photo by Katherine Volkovski on Unsplash

Looming Food Crisis? Stop Turning Corn into Ethanol and You Could Lower Gas Prices and Help Feed the World

by Steve MacDonald

F Joe Biden, who ran on not passing the buck, has yet to take responsibility for anything that’s gone sideways (or backward) under his rheumy-eyed “leadership.” A tactic he may have learned from Light Bringer (peace be upon him), though I suspect it’s just environmental.

Politics: Why is Ethanol in Gasoline Suddenly Bad for the Environment? (When it Always Was)

by Steve MacDonald

The government has been forcing corn ethanol into your gas tank for a while now, and it’s been a scientific fact that this was bad for engines and emissions. That’s been crazy talk for ten years, but there’s been a disturbance in the political force. Suddenly ethanol is bad.

Why “Green” Energy?

by Steve MacDonald

If you wanted to bring western civilization down, give it a good beating for all its so-called malfeasance, what better way than to make it near impossible to sustain the things that made being a western civilization all it was cracked up to be?

Consider that which makes us or any of our allies any sort of global power? Wealth and energy. Commerce, industrialization, transportation, and militarization to protect it or project it.

We can mince the finer points about what makes all this possible but they all share one thing in common. Cheap, abundant energy.

So if you had a mind to take the average Western Civilization down a notch or two, or even all of them, to make an example of a country like, say America, the fastest way to do that would be to cry wolf about something that would be difficult to dispute and easy to frighten people with; something that would make cheap abundant energy so threatening that no one would pay much attention to the real threats that not having it might present; you’d put forward a theory of global catastrophe that demanded we redirect massive amounts of wealth into expensive forms of energy incapable of sustaining the level of commerce, industrialization, transportation, or defense that we’ve come to enjoy.

You’d invent Global Warming and then blame the people who make the cheap abundant energy for causing it.

Food prices and global …cooling?

by Steve MacDonald

Personally I’d rather risk being warm and fed, than cold, broke, and starving.

The Invertebrate Jeanne Shaheen?

by Steve MacDonald

So did Jeanne Shaheen vote for cloture on the Reid’s Frankenstein tax compromise and will she vote to pass it? I ask because it includes Billions for a one year extension of ethanol subsidies that Senator Shaheen just insisted we could not afford.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

by Steve MacDonald

Reason TV via Instapundit

What’s Greene Shaheen Up To?

by Steve MacDonald

Senator Shaheen has signed onto a letter to Senate Majority leader Reid and Minority leader McConnell, suggesting that the corn based ethanol mandates, and all the tariffs and protections associated with it, not be extended. Your initial reaction might be surprise, but this is not in and of itself surprising. Shaheen is on the record being against them since at least 2008 when she ran for the US Senate but not because she is against ethanol. Her problem is the kind of ethanol, and so we can assume her co-signers have similar issues.

On the surface they are claiming to be against the law (the mandate) that props up ethanol on three fronts and also gives 31 billion dollars to the oil companies to offset the cost of forcing them to add ethanol to fossil based motor fuels. I’m against corporate welfare so I can’t object to repeal even with ulterior motives, but this starts off as a calculated, backhanded poke in the eye, not just to the stupidity of the subsidy regime that liberals normally love, but to big oil. And we should expect oil to get screwed. We should simply accept that even with repeal of the ethanol mandate, we could still see the government use other means of legislative or bureaucratic force to keep ethanol in the fuel supply and pass those costs off to the oil companies. If they can screw oil and get what they really want along the way, that’s a dream come true to Progressives. But what do these signers really want?

As usual, nothing in Washington is quite what it seems.