Hostage to the planet's saviors
The Biofuel Follies
Excerpt:
ANWR's 10.4 billion barrels of oil have become hostage to the planet's saviors (e.g., John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), who block drilling in even a tiny patch of ANWR. You could fit Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware into ANWR's frozen desolation; the "footprint" of the drilling operation would be one sixth the size of Washington's Dulles airport.
Clinton has an alternative to drilling: Oil should be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve—which exists to protect the nation against major interruptions of supply—as "a signal to the market." A signal of what? Readiness to release more? All 698 million barrels? Then what?
....
James and Stephen Eaves, writing in Regulation quarterly, note that if the entire U.S. corn crop were turned into ethanol— it might have to be to meet the goal of 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017—it would displace 3.5 percent of gasoline use, just slightly more than would be displaced if drivers properly inflated their tires. And because the United States produces 40 percent of the world's corn supply and 70 percent of global corn exports, turning corn into fuel will damage the world's poor at a time when rising demand will require a tripling of world food production by 2050.
Comment: George Will eviscerates McCain too!
Super Tuesday: Time for bed but early on, Huckabee has surprising victories.
Jim, what happened to that one guy? I was hoping we'd finally start to see some action on your board, but he posted once or twice and now is gone. Looks it it's just you and me again.
ReplyDeleteHave you heard anything about ethanol and how it can be made from many organic products and not just corn? Supposedly it can be made from sugar cane, prairie grass and even garbage. If this is the case, then I wonder why in America we are only hearing about making ethanol from corn?
But then again, if we had more freedom to extract oil, maybe ethanol wouldn't even be an issue. Some people seem to think that there is enough oil in Alaska to last us 200 years and even oil in other places like the Gulf of Mexico that would last quite a long while as well. It seems to be politics that is stopping us from getting oil more than supply/demand.