Welcome to the college of converts, Mr. Vice President. "It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol," Al Gore told a gathering of clean energy financiers in Greece this week. The benefits of ethanol are "trivial," he added, but "It's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going." No kidding, and Mr. Gore said he knows from experience: "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President." Mr. Gore's mea culpa underscores the degree to which ethanol has become a purely political machine: It serves no purpose other than re-electing incumbents and transferring wealth to farm states and ethanol producers. Nothing proves this better than the coincident trajectories of ethanol and Mr. Gore's career. Ethanol's claim on the Treasury was first made amid the 1970s energy crisis, with Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress subsidizing anything that claimed to be a substitute for foreign oil. Mr. Gore, freshman House class of 1976, was an early proponent of what was then called "gasahol." The subsidies continued through the 1990s, with the ethanol lobby finding a sympathetic ear in Clinton EPA chief and Gore protege Carol Browner, who in 1994 banned the gasoline additive MTBE and left ethanol as the only option under clean air laws. When the Senate split 50-50 on repealing this de facto mandate, then Vice President Gore cast the deciding vote for . . . ethanol. That served him well in the 2000 Democratic primaries against ethanol critic Bill Bradley...
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I sure wish they would have an "epiphany" before they vote and saddle us with these programs.
Anyway, it may just be a mini-epiphany. The editorial says:
"But the boondoggle lives on in dreams for so-called advanced fuels like cellulosic ethanol. Note Mr. Gore's objection only to "first generation," though we've been hearing that advanced ethanol is just a year or two away from viability for two decades."
1 comment:
Al Gore is not the only one with epiphanies... witness Richard Branson, who a year after pledging billions for ethanol, recanted, and is now searching for other venues; Pickens has also fallen off his original gung-ho pickens plan to turn everything to hydrogen. Truth is we are all on a steep learning curve, and most businessmen and politicos are still trying to game the system and make do with whatever we already have going and build from there. The clincher is that to get GHG emmissions down below 350ppm as Hansen says we need to, we would need to cut 80% of the gasses from fossil fuels. Since no one alternative fuel can replace petroleum and other fossil fuels, everyone is out trying to find the next best thing - without the benefit of systems thinking (taking the whole environment into consideration)... not to mention social justice, health and education concerns. At least many city, municipal and state governments are paying for studies and doing what they can (albeit with goals of 30% to 40% and not 80%). In the absence of an international and a national policy, we all have to do what we can.
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