For Once a good Bi-Partisan action
Ethanol from corn was always a really bad idea. It made food more expensive and cars less efficient while enriching agribusiness. In a bipartisan vote both Republicans and Democrats stood up to their corn belt piers and said enough is enough.
The Senate voted 73-27 Thursday to kill a major tax break that benefits the ethanol industry, handing a political win to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that call the incentive needless and expensive.
The vote also could have ramifications on future votes to reduce the deficit. Much of the GOP conference supported Feinstein’s bill even though it does not include another tax break to offset the elimination of the ethanol tax credit.
Bio-fuel may be a solution but ethanol from corn never was. Will they have the guts to end the ethanol requirement? Will Obama veto the bill? A secondary benifit is it hurt that repulsive little twerp Grover Norquist.
9 Responses to “For Once a good Bi-Partisan action”
Yup, good vote. Not terribly substantive or meaningful in a systemic perspective, but still a good one.
Too bad it is attached to a bill that will never become law, so it was still just a window-dressing vote.
It’s a start. Hopefully this is one issue both sides can have the will to step up to and stop. I’m a midwest guy, but this has never made any sense in any way, shape or form. It really needs to end.
The house did something similar. It looks like there’s at least one special interest that’s losing its pull.
May it be the first of many.
Ron,
If you want to learn more about food and about ethanol and how it affects food prices, the basic economics related to it, I recommend a book I recommended to Joe Windish (because it is about food). It includes a chapter (the first chapter, in fact) about biofuels, intended to explain the effect biofuel production has or can have on food prices. A veryinteresting feature of this book is that it is very timely, and includes changes in food prices and other activity (such as biofuel production) before and during the Big Slump that struck us all hard in 2008.
http://www.ftpress.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1552966
Page 9 onward, Sir.
(Pages 13 and 14 are omitted — I can give you the stats from that Table 1.1 and related arguments, dual interpretations of the data by the pro and anti biofuel sides, if you are curious. Page 15 ends the anti-biofuel [anti-corn-based-ethanol] interpretation.)
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ru3RUTbJCI8C&lpg=PP1&ots=3yufS3lyyc&dq=Patrick%20Westhoff%20%20The%20Economics%20of%20Food&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false
FYI — food for thought (no pun intended)
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Hey, maybe an (effectively) symbolic (or formally non-binding, even) vote to end sugar price supports will come next! Down goes the attraction of the alternative to sugar, namely high fructose corn syrup (striking the corn lobby in a second way).
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Is Dwayne O. Andreas (Bob Dole campaign-related but bets big on both Dems and the GOP) of Archer-Daniels-Midland fame still alive? Presumably if he’s still alive but not going to Washington, then this vote is no serious threat to him.
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I always thought the best biofuel is and remains butanol.
(have to limit remaining links due to nature of the comment system)
http://www.chemsystems.com/reports/search/docs/prospectus/MC08_Biobutanol_Prospectus.pdf
Etc.
If people want to know more about butanol as a fuel or blending additive, or about bio-butanol, here are some suitable links.
(Note that yes, corn can be used to make butanol, which means continued interest in corn for fuels [as well as other plant sources]. Even using corn, replacing ethanol with butanol for motor vehicle fuels and for industrial uses, using more corn than is used to make ethanol now, constitutes progress.)
older
nabc.cals.cornell.edu/pubs/nabc_19/NABC19_5Plenary2_Ramey.pdf
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/AF/448.pdf
newer — state of various approaches to making butanols
biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2010/06/15/biobutanol-the-fuel-to-leap-the-blend-wall/
http://www.biofuelstp.eu/butanol.html
Good vote (again if it holds up).
This country, and the states as well, REALLY needs to evaluate the litmus test for industrial subsidies. Industrial subsidies should be a VERY rare thing, and only in cases that really and truly hold a strong national security or general public welfare purpose. And by “general public welfare”, I mean “if we’re all starving to death” or something equally grave, and NOT “we want to win the Iowa caucuses”.
Along with the specific (winning the Iowa caucuses), there’s what sometimes is specific but often general, which I heard once again on the radio (far-lefty talk radio), that “we need an industrial policy.”
Note that corn-based ethanol (and the corn lobby, and to the extent it’s involved, which it is, agribusiness) can be politically disfavored, not necessarily favored. And suppression of it because of political disfavorability really isn’t any more wise than picking winners, in addition to losers.
Ron — aside from the question of “crowding out” — no, not government crowding out the private sector when it comes to finance or anything else, but with the “food or fuel” debate:
if you wanted to know more about “pure biofuel” crops to use instead of corn, there’s the old favorite, switchgrass, and what’s more of a darling to many, miscanthus. Here is a report from Michigan, with a maritime-influence climate similar to yours. In fact, miscanthus’s map for where it grows best includes your Northwestern littoral. (One must be concerned about irrigation and water supply and use when considering growing crops like these in the arid West.)
http://www.bioeconomyconference.org/Documents/Kurt-Thelen-MSU.pdf
And here’s one promoted “brand,” from the South, of miscanthus:
http://www.repreverenewables.com/docs/FreedomBiofuel-BF1010d.pdf
http://www.repreverenewables.com/freedom-giant-miscanthus.html
(I think about, among other things, what a crop like that in the Midwest would do for record-sized whitetail deer. And think of how bigger the blacktails in the Northwest could get.)
Have fun reviewing that material.