July 3rd 2008
Fuel And Food Facts
H
ow quickly the fickle heart of the liberal, green democrat changes! It seems like only yesterday they had nothing but nice things to say about ethanol – it’s renewable, it’s good for our planet, look how much better Brazil is than our stinky, inept country!
And now, you need not go any farther than lib columnist Paul Krugman to see that ethanol hasn’t just been dumped, it’s been trashed – charged with murder, even:
And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.
And rising oceans will soon engulf New York! Writing in Car & Driver, Patrick Bedard snuffs this bit of liberal lying from the lexicon:
Your enduring columnist has always maintained that corn ethanol is a political fuel, not a sensible one. But the gloomsters are tossing up despearately silly arguments in their anti-ethanol screeds. As for starvation in Africa, U.S. corn exports are up this year to that continent where they’re use overwhelmingly as animal feed.
Ethanol is made from field corn, not the sweet corn of our dinner tables or the white corn of tortillas – and not only that, it’s made from the starch portions of field corn, so the protein and oil is still available for animal feed. Each 56-pound bushel of corn, Bedard tells us, yields about 2.8 gallons of ethanol and 16 to 18 pounds of feed.
Bedard dispenses with the idea that ethanol caused an increase in food prices – in anything ethanol probably kept a lid on increases because the real culprit was oil. He quotes a Fed report:
Historically food prices have surged during times of higher crude … a 10-percent gain in energy prices could contribute 5.2 percent to retail food prices.
But the shrill, defeatist voices of the environmental left can’t be bothered with mere facts:
Barely beneath the words of these gloomsters is the anti-growth agenda they dare not utter. But Ted turner has no fear, and he flat said it in an April interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose. “We’re too many people,”‘ he said. “‘We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff … in 200 or 40 years … most of the people will have died, and the rest of us will be cannibals.”
They really want to believe this stuff. They really need to be the messianic force of change, the saviors of the world. Why? Because every wretched thing they’ve predicted since the 1970s hasn’t come to pass, so it’s looking to them that their entire belief system just might be false. Rather than switch beliefs, they become more and more strident, like the street preacher whose rhetoric gets more inflamed each time Jesus doesn’t return as predicted.
