Posted on 04/23/2008 2:05:26 PM PDT by antonia
Will Media Remember Gore's 1994 Tie-breaking Vote Mandating Ethanol?
By Noel Sheppard
As the international disaster of ethanol begins taking its toll on the planet -- and, maybe more important, as press outlet after press outlet finally begins recognizing it -- will media remember that Vice President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate requiring this oxygenate be added to gasoline?
After all, regardless of recent reports blaming ethanol for world hunger problems, rising food costs, and increased greenhouse gases, it seems highly unlikely green media will want to tie any of these problems to Nobel Laureate Gore.
Yet, as inconveniently reported by States News Service on August 3, 1994 (no link available, emphasis added throughout):
In a move that enraged midwestern senators, Louisiana Democratic Sen. Bennett Johnston tried Wednesday to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from mandating the use of ethanol in reformulated gasoline. The Senate narrowly killed the measure, voting to table it by a margin of 51 to 50. With the vote tied, Vice President Al Gore had to come in and cast the deciding vote. [...]
" This is really a gigantic flim flam to the American public," Johnston said. [...]
Under the Clean Air Act, the nation's nine smoggiest cities must begin reducing auto emissions by using a cleaner-burning fuel known as reformulated gasoline in January. Reformulated gasoline contains more oxygen than regular fuel.
Until the EPA announced its decision last month, oil refiners had a choice of boosting oxygen in reformulated gasoline with either ethanol or MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), a petroleum derivative. MTBE is made from natural gas. The nation's major oil companies have natural gas facilities, many of which are overseas. [...]
During the four-hour debate, opponents of the ethanol mandate said the measure contains hidden costs. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the policy would cost the government $249 million during the next five years. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation has predicted the ethanol rule would drain $545 million from the national highway trust fund each year.
" It's highway robbery," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. "It's nothing less."
Besides Gore, take a look at who else was DEAD wrong on this issue:
[Democratic Illinois Sen. Paul] Simon added that the ethanol mandate would not increase costs for consumers.
" The price of corn flakes isn't going to go up by one penny," he said. "Don't think you're helping consumers by voting for the amendment by my friend from Louisiana."
I beg to differ, Senator. As my colleague Paul Detrick reported on April 4 (emphasis added):
You're going to need a few extra bucks to pay for those corn flakes every morning.
CNN's senior business correspondent Ali Velshi let viewers in on an underreported fact about rising commodities prices: the government mandate for ethanol production is making corn and other agricultural products more expensive-making inflation a top priority for Americans.
" Several years ago, we made some decisions about how corn is going to be used to make ethanol, which is added to our gasoline," said Velshi on "American Morning" April 4. "A number of people think that that was meant to reduce our dependency on crude oil. What is does is it takes what is fundamentally a food source and makes it into a gasoline source. That's caused corn to go up."
He went on to explain that in the recent food commodities surge, which includes products like wheat, soybeans and rice, corn has gone up to $6 a bushel-making everything from animal feed to cereal more expensive.
Nice call, Sen. Simon!
For those interested, here's how the New York Times reported the news (emphasis added):
With a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Al Gore, the Senate upheld today an Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring that ethanol and other renewable fuels get a share of the gasoline additives market.
The Senate voted 51-50 to table an amendment that would have denied financing to the agency to carry out a rule guaranteeing renewable fuels a 15 percent share of the lucrative fuel oxygenate market in 1995. That share rises to 30 percent in following years.
Under the Clean Air Act, oxygenates, which make fuel burn more cleanly, are to be added to gasoline in the nation's smoggiest areas.
Tabling the amendment, offered by Democratic Senators Bennett J. Johnston of Louisiana and Bill Bradley of New Jersey, in effect kills it and clears the way for E.P.A. to carry out its program.
All, in the end, thanks to Nobel Laureate Al Gore.
Of course, as the ethanol crisis widens, I'm sure media will be reminding the electorate of this pivotal vote fourteen years ago...not!
- Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
All of those Senators who supported ethanol over methanol should be made to answer for their actions-not just Al “Manbearpig” Gore. And it’s about time someone starts to ask questions of ADM and their role in the decision.
All the corn’s been sent for Ethanol production. Can I interest you in a tall glass of light sweet crude instead?
This is another example of why it is important that the libs NOT get 60 Senate Seats in November. Vote Republican.
We will be up to our eyes in “global warming” regulations that will cost us as taxpayers millions, like this little gem from 1994. Seemed like a good idea at the time but extremely poorly executed.
It’s like I keep telling people, it’s the tree-huggers who are gonna kill us.
Many of you have written to me to ask why I recently taped an advertisement with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for The Alliance for Climate Protection, a group founded by former Vice President Al Gore.
I completely understand why many of you would have questions about this, so I want to take this opportunity to explain my reasons. First of all, I want to be clear: I don't think that we have conclusive proof of global warming. And I don't think we have conclusive proof that humans are at the center of it.
But here's what we do know. There is an important debate going on right now over the right energy policy, the right environmental policy, and making sure we do the right things for our future and the future of our children and grandchildren. Conservatives are missing from this debate, and I think that's a mistake. When it comes to preserving our environment for future generations, we can't have a slogan of "Just yell no!"
I have a different view. I think it's important to be on the stage, to engage in the debate, and to communicate our position clearly. There is a big difference between left-wing environmentalism that wants higher taxes, bigger government., more bureaucracy, more regulation, more red tape, and more litigation and a Green Conservatism that wants to use science, technology, innovation, entrepreneurs, and prizes to find a way to creatively invent the kind of environmental future we all want to live in. Unless we start making the case for the latter, we're going to get the former. That's why I took part in the ad.
Sure, if it's been refined into ethyl alcohol.
80proof will be fine.
In addition to buying members of Congress, they also buy a lot of ad time on shows featuring both political pundits and members of Congress.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Ugh... must be very sleepy... I see now...
I remember the environmental issue as being stolen from the conservatives; as in hunters and conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt. In 1964 when I just a little girl my Dad and I were going to visit my grandfather in the Rutland Hospital. It was the middle of winter and there was a herd of deer encamped right out in the front of the hospital. Dad pointed out some sick ones and noted that the deer were visible because there had been a new law enacted about how many deer people could shoot. Hence the over population and resulting disease.
http://www.nysun.com/news/food-crisis-eclipsing-climate-change
Food Crisis Starts Eclipsing Climate Change Worries
Gore Ducks, as a Backlash Builds Against Biofuels
By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 25, 2008
The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food
crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs
as substitutes for fossil fuels.
With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has
broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several
countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that
governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.
One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government
subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An
estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.
“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to
the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,”
a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota,
C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the
International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a
quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is
attributable to biofuels.
Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article
in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”
“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I
think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”
Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on
foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to
fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for
ethanol’s prospects.
===> “It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,”
===> Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota,
===> said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly
===> enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”
Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore,
need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort
against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the
solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught
up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are
lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to
those.”
Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food
crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public
campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection,
declined to comment for this article.
However, the scientist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore,
Rajendra Pachauri of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel of
Climate Change, has warned that climate campaigners are unwise to
promote biofuels in a way that risks food supplies. “We should be very,
very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major
impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for
overall food security,” Mr. Pachauri told reporters last month,
according to Reuters. “Questions do arise about what is being done in
North America, for instance, to convert corn into sugar then into
biofuels, into ethanol.”
In an interview last year, Mr. Gore expressed his support for corn-based
ethanol, but endorsed moving to what he called a “third generation” of
so-called cellulosic ethanol production, which is still in laboratory
research. “It doesn’t compete with food crops, so it doesn’t put
pressure on food prices,” the former vice president told Popular
Mechanics magazine.
A Harvard professor of environmental studies who has advised Mr. Gore,
Michael McElroy, warned in a November-December 2006 article in Harvard
Magazine that “the production of ethanol from either corn or sugar cane
presents a new dilemma: whether the feedstock should be devoted to food
or fuel. With increasing use of corn and sugar cane for fuel, a rise in
related food prices would seem inevitable.” The article, “The Ethanol
Illusion” went so far as to praise Senator McCain for summing up the
corn-ethanol energy initiative launched in the United States in 2003 as
“highway robbery perpetrated on the American public by Congress.”
In Britain, some hunger-relief and environmental groups have turned
sharply against biofuels. “Setting mandatory targets for biofuels before
we are aware of their full impact is madness,” Philip Bloomer of Oxfam
told the BBC.
Biofuel advocates say they are being made a bogeyman for a food crisis
that has much more to do with record oil prices, surging demand in the
developing world, and unusual weather patterns. “The people who seek to
solely blame ethanol for the food crisis and the rising price of food
that we see across the globe are taking a terribly simplistic look at
this very complex issue,” Matthew Hartwig of the Renewable Fuels
Association said.
Mr. Hartwig said oil companies and food manufacturers are behind the
attempt to undercut ethanol. “There is a concerted misinformation
campaign being put out there by those people who are threatened by
ethanol’s growing prominence in the marketplace,” he said.
The most obvious impact the food crisis has had in America, aside from
higher prices, is the imposition of rationing at some warehouse stores
to deal with a spike in demand for large quantities of rice, oil, and
flour. The CEO of Costco Wholesale Corp., James Sinegal, is blaming
press hype for the buying limits, which were first reported Monday in
The New York Sun.
“If it hadn’t been picked up and become so prominent in the news, I
doubt that we would have had the problems that we’re having in trying to
limit it at this point,” Mr. Sinegal told Fox News Thursday. “I mean, I
can’t believe the amount of attention that is being paid to this.”
The Sun’s article, which came as food riots were reported abroad,
circulated quickly on the Internet, was republished in newspapers as far
away as India, and prompted local and network television stories.
Speaking in Kansas City, Mo., yesterday, the federal agriculture
secretary, Edward Schafer, blamed emotion for the spurt of rice buying
at warehouse stores. “We don’t see any evidence of the lack of
availability of rice. There are no supply issues,” he told reporters,
according to Reuters.
—
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