It's Getting Harder to Bring Home the Bacon (it's Bush's fault!) (Big Government® at work)

The Wall Street Journal ^ | 2011-04-29 | Mary Kissel

[rabscuttle385]

(snip)

What triggered the upswing? In part: ethanol. President George W. Bush "came forward with—what do you call?—the edict that we were going to mandate 36 billion gallons of alternative fuels" by 2022, of which corn-based ethanol is "a substantial part." Companies that blend ethanol into fuel get a $5 billion annual tax credit, and there's a tariff to keep foreign producers out of the U.S. market. Now 40% of the corn crop is "directed to ethanol, which equals the amount that's going into livestock food," Mr. Pope calculates.

(snip)

Food price inflation isn't a problem confined to America's shores. "This ethanol policy has impacted the world price of corn," Mr. Pope says. The Mexican, Canadian and European industries have "shrunk dramatically. . . . We have an unsustainable meat protein production industry," he says. "We're built on a platform of costs, on a policy that doesn't make any sense!"

Nor does the science. The ethanol industry would supply only 4% of the nation's annual energy needs even if it used 100% of the corn crop. The Environmental Protection Agency has found ethanol production has a neutral to negative impact on the environment.

(snip)

So what's the solution? First, Mr. Pope says, get rid of the ethanol subsidies and the tariff. "I am in competition with the government and the oil industry," he says. "It's not fair." Smithfield's economists estimate corn prices would fall by a dollar a bushel if ethanol blending wasn't subsidized. "Even the announcement that it is going away would see the price of corn go down, which would translate very quickly into reduced meat prices in the meat case," he says. Imagine what would happen if the mandate and tariff were eliminated, too.

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[Disambiguator]

We’re switching from coffee to tea. Much cheaper.

I would switch to beer, but drinking it in the morning before I go to work might present some problems.

[Excellence]

How does one avoid it? I thought it was mandatory.

[VeniVidiVici]

Exactly. I’ve been avoiding the stuff since they first started pushing it. This crap doesn’t have the energy content of real gasoline and it’s corrosive

I hate the stuff too. Diesel, baby. :-)

[Desdemona]

Actually, when it comes to corn and all products derived from it, including real sugar substitutes, IMO it's worth it to quit eating the stuff, not just decry the ethanol lobby. The problem comes in that corn is also in animal feed, so that drives up costs even further.

It's all one gigantic cluster.

[SunkenCiv]

One-half gallon of oil in the form of pesticides per bushel of corn would cost $2 to $3 per bushel. If this were true -- and it clearly isn't -- it should be enough to illustrate to literally anyone that the price of petroleum is quite literally the ONLY thing driving corn prices. And this idiotic piece of agitprop -- from a hydrogen "energy" advocacy site -- also shows the guy in the encounter suit spraying chemical fertilizer, a sight that I've never been privileged to see, what with me *growing up on a farm*. The Bum Rap on Biofuels Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed