Ethanol R.I.P. well let's hope so

Alleluia the congress has seen the light. Here is the first paragraph of a Washington Times story this morning about congress re-thinking its stand on ethanol:

Members of Congress say they overreached by pushing ethanol on consumers and will move to roll back federal supports for it — the latest sure signal that Congress' appetite for corn-based ethanol has collapsed as food and gas prices have shot up.

Maybe the potentates who take up space and oxygen in the nation’s capitol stumbled upon one of Lex’s many posts advising congress to stop burning our food supply for energy. Well over a year ago, I read a Mark Steyn piece on the bio-fuel craze. Steyn’s take away quote was along the line of, “this generation will go down in history as the dumbest of a very long line of dumb humans for burning food as fuel when there are ample supplies of other commodities perfectly suited for that purpose available.”

Well intentioned liberals thought it a good idea to use “clean burning” corn and other food as a means to off set our requirement for oil. That sounds good so far. Use clean renewable corn as fuel instead of dirty finite oil. Let’s do it.

Well, only when you get into it do you discover all of the unintended consequences. It turns out that ethanol is just another liberal feel good plan, like welfare, universal healthcare, food stamps, free condoms for teenagers, free needles for crack addicts, open borders, gun control, taxing “the rich” etc. etc that cause more problems while not doing a single thing to mitigate the problem the program was designed to fix.

Turns out it took a $1.20 of dirty fuel to produce a buck’s worth of ethanol. No problem, the government will subsidize the production of ethanol. Uh OK, but doesn’t it defeat the purpose if you have to use more dirty fuel to produce it than you get from the “clean energy alternative” you’re producing? No. Hell no. This is about the environment and ethanol is the answer.

Then they discovered that ethanol strips 10-20% off the life of an engine. No problem, cried the bio-fuel crowd. Auto makers were jubilant as well. Then food price went through the roof. Corn producers were delighted. So much so that corn was about the only crop farmers were interested in producing. But still corn was too expensive to feed to chickens or any other farm animal for that matter. So the price of cereal and nearly every other food stuff has gone up. Way up. No problem. Ethanol is the way of the future.

Then in the piece de resistance of liberal unintended consequences, they discovered that bio-fuel isn’t all that clean after all.

Meanwhile the commodity perfectly suited for the purpose has lain fallow under an arctic wasteland because liberal enviro-wackos didn’t want to give up a piece of the wasteland the size of a mall parking lot to provide reliable energy to a world starving for it.