- The mix of feel-good environmentalism and politics is officially dead.
- 11/22/10, "American gets Gored," IBD editorial
- That says a lot about the reality of environmentalism in government.
As the ethanol tax credit comes up for renewal in Congress on Dec. 31, it's worth noting it only came about because the vice president
- cast the decisive 51st vote in favor of it in 1994.
At the time, he packaged it as a big move to preserve the environment in a market-friendly, sustainable manner, and
- for years defended his vote because it was supposedly good for us.
"The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be," he recounted in 1998.
Now the real story emerges. On Monday he matter-of-factly told a bankers group in Greece it was actually about helping himself.
- "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," the former vice president said.
One is tempted to praise a man who admits mistakes, but the magnitude of what Gore actually did through his cynically cast vote as an elected leader in a position of trust suggests sorry isn't enough.
Gore's vote drove food prices higher, trashed the environment, and drew American capital into inefficient energy sources over efficient ones. This should be an object lesson in the importance of not trusting politicians on the environment.
- Start with what it is — a tax credit for special interests that has cost U.S. taxpayers $16 billion. And costs are rising. The centrally planned ethanol mandate has risen from 7.5 billion gallons by 2012 to 35 billion by 2022. In the last year alone, it's cost $7 billion.
From the tax credit, refiners make a profit on blended ethanol even when it costs more than gasoline, an unfair price distortion.
- No wonder refiners told farmers they could buy all the corn they could grow — Uncle Sam was picking up the tab.
Today, 41% of all corn grown in America goes to ethanol — not to the dinner table.
Among the unintended consequences, farmland that had been efficiently planted with multiple crops ended up as monolithic cornfields, using 1,700 gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol.
- Food prices surged as the government's ethanol monster got fed.
As corn exports fell, inflation soared abroad. In Mexico, riots broke out over rising tortilla prices. Inflation hurts the poor most.
- Then there was the product itself, ethanol, a fuel that's been around since the days of Henry Ford. It burns 30% less efficiently than other forms of energy, such as oil, clean coal, shale and natural gas. As IBD wrote earlier this month, ethanol "has never made much sense economically or environmentally." Gore confirms this.
Still, ethanol mandates did wonders for Gore's political life, bringing him everything from a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for environmentalism to big bucks to speak in places like Athens, Greece.
- By his own admission, Gore's mistake came at our expense and for that he deserves scorn.
More importantly, the feel-good era of environmentalism by government diktat must end.
Taxpayers shouldn't be sacrificed on the altar of environmentalism to satisfy one man's ambitions."
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(I just read an article dated 11/23 at a well-known warmist site. Talk about ignoring "the science." He went on at length about how they were going to convert people who didn't "accept" their version of "the science." He quoted Al Gore as if he were still a guru-after Gore just admitted he lied for many years about "the science." The man should be in jail for the ethanol scandal at minimum. If you revere a guy who admits he did great harm to millions of people, knows it, and casually dismisses it as no big deal, you're as bad as he is. Very sick people, of course they get invited to parties with Soros and Leonardo. ed.)
via Tom Nelson
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