By Alan Caruba
This appeared here, and I would like to thank Alan for allowing me to publish his work. RK
The government mandated blend of ethanol in every gallon
of gasoline is a full-fledged disaster and neither Congress, nor the Environmental
Protection Agency shows any indication of either repealing or abandoning it.
A recent Wall Street
Journal editorial said, “A strong candidate for the most expensive
policy blunder of recent years would have to be the mandate to blend corn
ethanol and other biofuels into the nation’s gasoline supply. Last month even
the Environmental Protection Agency essentially acknowledged that the program
is increasingly unworkable and costly to consumers. The EPA just won’t do much
to fix it.”
Some future historian will calculate how many trillions
this nation wasted when it passed a law in 2007 that was supposed to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions to save the Earth from global warming and to provide a
domestic energy source to compete with OPEC oil.
Implicit in that calculation will have to be the millions, if not billions, of automobiles whose engines were ruined by ethanol. Another element of the calculation is the way the cost of food at home and around the world was increased needlessly by requiring approximately 42% of the U.S. corn crop be used for ethanol production. It is more than the amount of corn used to feed livestock and poultry nationwide.
Only an environmentalist would think it was a good idea
to burn food as fuel instead of permitting corn to be used as part of the
nation’s food chain and for export. As a former Republican member of the House
of Representatives, Bob Beauprez
of Colorado, noted in a Washington Times commentary, “The ethanol mandate has
sent corn prices skyrocketing, harmed cattle and poultry producers, forced
refiners to waste money on ethanol credits, and hiked food prices worldwide.”
The ethanol mandate is so crazy that, not just corn must
be sacrificed, but “cellulosic” ethanol, made from switch grass and wood chips,
is also required. It isn’t even being produced despite the law, but the EPA
continues to levy fines against oil company refineries for failing to buy and
use a fuel that doesn’t exist. The cost of that is, of course, passed along to
consumers.
In January, the D.C. Court of Appeals struck down the
EPA’s 2012 cellulosic mandate as unrealistically high. The EPA has announced
that it is reducing the 2013 cellulosic ethanol mandate to a mere six million
gallons.
In order to remain in compliance with the requirement to
blend ethanol, even though refiners are producing less gasoline than the law
mandates, they have been forced to purchase ethanol credits called Renewable
Identification Numbers (RINs). The price of these RINs has climbed from seven
cents in January to a high of $1.43 in July. All this does is increase the cost
of gas at the pump without having a single good reason for the existence of the
ethanol blend.
Determined to force ethanol into our fuel, the EPA
granted a partial waiver for the sale of E15, a motor fuel that contains 15%
ethanol and 85% gasoline, approving it for use in 2001 and later model cars and
trucks. The Wall Street Journal noted a survey by AAA found that “only 5% of
vehicles are approved for higher levels of ethanol under manufacturer
warranty.”
All this waste and stupidity comes from three decades of
lies about global warming and the supposed need to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. The President continues to lie about global warming/climate change
despite the fact that Earth has entered its seventeenth year of a cooling
cycle.
The EPA continues to distort the nation’s and the world’s
food supply so far as corn is concerned. It continues to ignore the damage
ethanol inflicts on auto and other engines. It ignores the needless increase in
the cost of gasoline to the consumer.
Americans are afflicted with a government that is
indifferent to the facts about ethanol and the EPA remains intent on punishing
Americans for their use of gasoline.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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