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December 26, 2007
Confused Americans for Truth - Pursuing Biofuels with Forks and Hope
Newsweek Online has posted an interview with Jeff Bingaman [D, NM] about the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, a law that mandates the production of ethanol as a replacement fuel for gasoline.
Mandates are the ultimate political solution to an economic problem. Rather than allowing the market to find the most economical way to produce energy, the law demands a politically correct result. We may discover that the result causes more problems than in solves. It may be the case that the result is not technologically possible. It may be that the result has damaging economic side effects. All of these questions are asked in the Newsweek piece. Bingaman's answer to all these questions is the basically the same: we hope this works. For example, here's his take on the price of food going up.
I don't think you're going to see people take fruit orchards out in order to plant corn to meet ethanol demand. We had several experts talk to us about the implications of going to these levels and nobody suggested that something like that would occur.
A cynical part of me suggests that the people in question are experts in saying what Congress wants to hear.
It may seem unrealistic to sit and hope for the market to come up with alternative energy sources, especially when part of the process involves weathering a storm of higher fuel costs while we shake out the good solutions from the bad ones, but it's even goofier to require that we solve a problem in a particular way and hope it doesn't make things worse.
The magic of petroleum is precisely that it's not renewable. It packs millions of years of work into a small space. There's another fuel out there that packs a bigger punch-- uranium. Unlike ethanol, the waste from uranium isn't ejected directly into the environment. There are no greenhouse gases.
In general, people are opposed to nuclear power, because unless it's being produced by a sworn enemy of the United States, it might be dangerous to the environment. It also has the problem of not being a final solution. That's the key to catch-phrases like renewable. and sustainable. They imply that our problems will be solved for all eternity, or at least until the current cold snap ends and the Earth returns to its normal temperature. (Why am I the only one who ever worries about that?) This solving-for-all-eternity thing is essential to produce the sort of bland, static utopia where socialism works.
President Bush has signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law, so we all have to live with it. For best results, however, we should also remember it. A few years from now, when the results start manifesting themselves, go back to Bingaman's interview and note the differences between what he hoped would happen and what actually happened. If there's a difference, consider voting for the other party so that guys like Bingaman don't have free rein to force the rest of us to pay for their hopes.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Wed 10:50 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags: biofuels Congress conservative Democrats energy ethanol Jeff Bingaman oil philosophy renewable socialism sustainable utopia
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