THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XI, Issue # 200, November 16, 2009
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
GREENS AGAIN BAIT & SWITCH ON ENERGY
By Dennis T. Avery
ENERGY, ETHANOL, & THE ENVIRONMENTALIST MOVEMENT: WHY THE GREENS, OR ENVIRONMENTALISTS, HAVE
CHANGED
THEIR MINDS, AS REGARDS ETHANOL BEING A GOOD ECO-SUBSTITUTE FOR GASOLINE -- THE IMPACT ON WORLD FOOD
PRICES OF USING CORN ETHANOL AS A MOTOR FUEL -- THE IMPACT OF A MASSIVE INCREASE IN ETHANOL PRODUCTION
ON FORESTS & WILDLIFE -- THE GREENS' ENERGY TAX POLICY AGENDA & WHAT WILL EFFECTIVELY BLOCK PURSUIT OF
THAT AGENDA
FULL STORY:
Back during the bad old Bush Presidency, the eco-movement loudly endorsed ethanol, particularly cellulosic ethanol, as a
good eco-substitute for gasoline. Now, they’ve changed their minds. They’re finally admitting that you can’t grow ethanol
and food on the same acres. If you’re going to add ethanol to your shopping list, you need to clear more land to grow the
feedstock. When forest or grassland is cleared and plowed, huge amounts of carbon stored in the soil gas off into the air.
If Global Warming is man-made, this is a serious problem.
This gem of newfound wisdom has just been published in the October 23, 2009, issue of Science, and dutifully
repeated by the Washington Post and the other Green media collaborators. The lead author is Princeton’s Tim
Searchinger, formerly a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Where were these political environmentalists when Bush and the Congress installed their ill-considered mandates for corn
and cellulosic ethanol? Three full years ago, I did a study with the Competitive Enterprise Institute titled Biofuels, Food
or Wildlife: The Massive Land Costs of U.S. Ethanol. I warned back then that making any useful amount of ethanol
would force us to plow millions more acres of wildlands — first for corn and then for poplar, pine, and other fast-growing
trees to make wood chips for cellulosic ethanol.
I warned there wasn’t enough land to go around. Nobody cared; because the Greens, or political environmentalists,
approved it. But the Greens are playing bait-n-switch. First it was solar, but the sun only shines for half of each 24 hours.
Clouds interrupt too. How can we keep the lights on at the school and the hospital?
Then it was wind turbines. But a big European Union power provider has testified that wind is so erratic you need 90
percent of your installed wind capacity matched in “spinning reserve” — burning fuel — from fossil or nuclear. Why
bother to make the wind turbines at all?
Corn ethanol nearly doubled world food prices in three years, and is set to do it again whenever there’s a short corn crop.
Cellulosic ethanol is still unworkable and the environmentalists are now telling us not to bother.
They don’t want us to have energy! Paul Ehrlich and Maurice Strong — the Canadian “grey eminence” of the United
Nations — agree that the threat to the earth is “too many rich people.” And energy is the key to the affluence. So we must
tax away the energy.
What about more nuclear plants that don’t emit carbon dioxide? The Obama administration won’t allow spent nuclear fuel
to be stored at Harry Reid’s Yucca Mountain, and it won’t permit reprocessing. Strike it off the list!
Now we learn that the energy-tax bills currently in the Congress contain a little clause that lets the White House renege on
all those emission permits the big companies have sold their souls for — if CO2 levels go too high. That’s not temperatures
too high, but CO2 levels in the atmosphere too high. So, what if CO2 has almost no linkage to our temperatures? As the
oceans recover from their Little Ice Age chill, the laws of physics guarantee higher and higher CO2 concentrations in the air.
Talk about legislative sleight-of-hand!
Again I will warn the Green movement: If children are starving for lack of nitrogen fertilizer for the crops (made with natural
gas); if elderly voters are literally freezing to death in their homes for lack of coal; those laws won’t be worth the paper they
were drafted on (considerable as the paper piles already are).
In fact, the Congress itself will race to change the laws before you can say “tea party.”
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Political Environmentalism Versus Human Progress & Prosperity:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Dennis T. Avery is an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He was
formerly a senior analyst for the U.S, Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global
Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years. Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to
cgfi@hughes.net
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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