Forbidden Campaign Issues, Sure Winners For Republicans

Voldemort! There, I said it! I have just named he who must not be named and was not smacked down by supernatural forces. And previously, I have even middle named Barack Obama without being cast screaming into the fiery pits of hell. So why is it that, in this political season, two of the greatest challenges facing our country cannot be honestly debated?

In one of his rare honest moments during the vice presidential debate, Democrat Joe Biden “accused” John McCain of voting against biofuel subsidies. If memory serves, the number of “no” votes tallied 21. Joe smugly believed he had won one. And he did, by forfeit. Sarah Palin, probably on orders from McCain, ignored the claim. What should have been a slam dunk win for McCain/Palin, ended up as a point for Obama/Biden. The ball was set up on the tee, and Sarah Palin, as all Republicans do these days, declined to hit it out of the park.

The biofuels that Obama and Biden tout is ethanol derived from corn. They claim that it will free us from foreign oil when they know for a fact that it cannot. Surely McCain and Palin know this as well, but they elect to keep the information to themselves.

The biggest problem with corn ethanol is that it takes about as much energy to make ethanol as one gets back from burning ethanol. When one takes into account the petroleum required to plow the fields, harvest the corn, manufacture the fertilizer, transport the corn to the distillery and distill the ethanol, you’re just about breaking even. But because ethanol is so corrosive, it cannot be delivered through pipelines and must be delivered by trucks and trains. More oil burned. Using the most optimistic calculations, if we were to sow every available acre in corn and convert it to ethanol, it would reduce our current oil imports by no more than 10%. Some actually estimate that we actually have a negative energy yield in corn ethanol.

Corn ethanol has the secondary effect of causing food prices to soar. Not only is corn more expensive, but so is beef, pork, poultry and dairy products, as feed is the number one expense for the producers. In addition, the prices of other starchy crops, such as wheat and rice, will follow corn. And because so many more acres are being planted in corn for ethanol production these days, fewer acres are planted in soybeans and other staple crops. The prices of these crops have soared as well. Burning corn is creating severe food shortages in other countries. The United Nations recently cited the diversion of food to fuel as the primary contributor to a worsening worldwide food crisis.

McCain and Palin should be proud that McCain has not voted for ethanol subsidies. And in a sane world, they could hang that albatross around their opponents’ necks and win handily this November. But alas, the corn ethanol is the boondoggle that must not be named.

The same goes for the financial crisis. In an honest world, McCain and Palin should be able to hang that one around their opponents’ necks as well, and not just because Obama accepted so much money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or because Obama has disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO’s as advisors.

Using nothing but the New York Times’ archives, one can follow the whole mortgage meltdown from its origins in 1999 in Clinton Administration directives to its fruition in 2008. And you will find Democratic Party fingerprints all over it.

But Republicans so fear being called racists that they won’t take it on directly. Indeed they have already been called racists for even mentioning Bill Clinton’s over interpretation of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act in regards to the crisis. Never mind that it is easily traced back. Intending to increase home ownership among minorities, the Clinton Administration enacted rules that forced banks to give loans to people with poor credit. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac then purchased those mortgages and are now stuck with loans that will never be repaid. It’s as simple as that. But Republicans tremble in fear as Democrats blame George Bush and free markets. A free market would never have made those loans.

What better opportunity is there to speak right past mainstream media filters than during a debate? Seventy million people watched Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Nearly as many watched Obama and McCain Tuesday.

Republicans might need a visit with the Wizard of Oz to ask for some courage.

Update: Are Republicans figuring this out?

John McCain and his Republican allies have elevated an unlikely pair of political villains to deflect blame for the slumping economy.

During a town hall in Wisconsin on Thursday, McCain called Senate Banking Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.) “willing co-conspirators” in the current financial collapse.

This comes as conservative talk radio hosts and an outside group aligned with the GOP accuse the duo of similar crimes against the economy, particularly an allegation that congressional Democrats blocked legislation to increase regulations and oversight for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This latest back-and-forth shows how political the economic crisis has become after party leaders on both sides of the aisle helped usher legislation through Congress last week granting the Department of the Treasury historic authority to buy up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets.

Republicans and Democrats observed a tentative truce during negotiations over that bill. But this week they were back at one another’s throats, and Republicans decided that targeting Dodd and Frank – not terribly well known outside the Beltway — might make for good campaign rhetoric.

Who Needs HIV? We Have Al Gore

As I pondered Earth Day this past week, I couldn’t help but wonder why Barack Obama would sit in the congregation of a pastor who claims that AIDS was created by America to exterminate black people. And I struggle to understand how someone who aspires to the highest political office in the land would keep company with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who believes the same thing.

After all, there is no reason whatsoever for Ronald Reagan’s CIA to cook up some exotic virus that selectively infects and kills Africans when we can accomplish the same thing without any great technological advances. After all, we have an environmentally conscious Congress. And Congress can kill people all around the world with something as mundane as a subsidy.

In the cause of fighting global warming and freeing America from dependence on foreign oil, our Congress created corn-to-ethanol subsidies, a hideously expensive program that accomplishes neither of those goals. And, as an added bonus, the ethanol subsidy has contributed to a dramatic increase in food prices around the world.

Congress recently raised subsidies so that annual ethanol production will rise from 6.5 billion gallons last year to a federally mandated 9 billion gallons this year. Ethanol production consumed nearly a fifth of all the corn grown in this country and the distilleries will use up to 30% of the crop this year. The Senate also set a goal of 36 billion gallons annually by 2022. Considering that one could feed a child for an entire year on the amount of corn required to produce just 11 gallons of ethanol, meeting that goal would require the pointless wastage of enough corn to satisfy the caloric requirements of just about every child on Earth.

According to Investor’s Business Daily, world grain prices have tripled, fertilizer has quadrupled and food prices have jumped 65% so far in 2008. The World Food Program has declared this the worst food crisis since World War II and says that 20 million children are now at risk of starvation. Would you care to guess the skin color of many if not most of those children? Why bother engineering a virus to commit genocide? We’ll just take food out of their mouths and burn it in our cars. On top of that, it takes nearly a gallon of petroleum to produce a gallon of ethanol.

The rush to produce ethanol has exacerbated a Gulf of Mexico dead zone as nitrogen fertilizers used to grow corn run off into the Mississippi River and into the gulf. Those fertilizers feed algal blooms that deplete oxygen and suffocate marine life.

Congress has just finished another round of its Soviet-style show trials, bringing oil company executives up to Capital Hill and forcing them to listen to ignorant harangues. Wouldn’t it be nice if we, the people, could call congressmen before our own tribunal and tell them what we think of the job they’re doing? Enron executives never committed crimes as egregious or costly as those of Congress.

Which brings me back to my original question. Why dream up some silly conspiracy theory about America creating the AIDS virus to kill black people? Why not focus on something as obvious and correctable as ethanol subsidies or DDT bans? Malaria, which was nearly wiped out before DDT was banned, has come back and kills more Africans than AIDS every year.

Perhaps the reason that Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan have to dream up wacky conspiracies to feed their flocks’ paranoia is that their Chosen One, Barack Obama, has favored and voted for ethanol subsidies all along. In fact, he’s the only one of the three presidential candidates left standing who has. Until she declared her candidacy for president, Hillary Clinton sensibly opposed ethanol subsidies. But last year with the Iowa caucuses looming and facing unexpectedly stiff competition, she proposed doubling the subsidy.

John McCain has opposed subsidies all along, although he has lately talked nice about ethanol, telling Iowa corn farmers that it “just makes sense,” which it most certainly does not. But at least he has refrained from voting for ethanol subsidies.

Earth Day is primarily about smug environmentalists celebrating themselves. And so I hope that you are all feeling good about all you’ve accomplished. I’d hate to think that all those children went to bed hungry for nothing.

By the way, Al Gore is laying low for this one. According to the author of the New York Sun article just cited,

"Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article."

I'd Like To Wish Al Gore A Happy Earth Day

Investor's Business Daily really hits the nail on the head with its Earth Day editorial today.

Shortage: Al Gore sees no climate improvement since he made "An Inconvenient Truth." Actually, things have gotten worse. As the environmentalists celebrate Earth Day, the rush to replace fossil fuels threatens global famine.

A week after Tax Day, April 15, we are forced to endure another indignity, Earth Day, April 22. This Earth Day finds the world threatened not by rising sea levels, but by rising food prices. Many on the planet are more likely to starve than drown, and we have only Gore's disciples to blame.

In an interview with the British paper The Sun, the jolly green giant whined: "I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006." The polar bears, he says, are still going to drown, and boats will soon be moored to the top of the Washington Monument.

To be sure, we're setting weather records, but they're not what Gore has in mind. Record cold temperatures have occurred over the globe this winter, and the only concern about flooding is from record snowfalls across the planet.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently warned of a more imminent threat, one ironically created by the rush to save the planet. Speaking in Accra, Ghana, the U.N. chief said the world must drastically increase food production to ease skyrocketing prices that have caused food riots in countries like Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Haiti.

The production of food grains has increased. But it is being diverted to empty gas tanks, not empty stomachs. Gore and others have warned that climate change is an imminent threat to the world. We would argue that climate-friendly policies are more of a threat.

The Gore-induced rush to biofuels has diverted crops such as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. Vast swaths of rain forest in places like Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to provide farmland not to feed the hungry but to fuel our cars. Our own grain belt has been increasingly diverted to ethanol over corn flakes.

This has pressured food prices while damaging the environment. In the U.S., more cultivation has increased runoff from pesticides and fertilizer, creating dead zones for aquatic life from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

As Indur M. Goklany of the Cato Institute reports, agricultural expansion leads to higher releases of carbon from biomass and soil above and below ground. Fertilizers that increase yields also increase nitrogen discharge into waters and emissions of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas that heats the atmosphere 300 times more effectively than carbon dioxide.

According to World Bank data, as of March, world grain prices had tripled and fertilizer prices had quadrupled since 2000. Food prices have risen an astounding 65% just since the beginning of this year.

"Climate-change remedies can lead to greater poverty, starvation and disease, as well as widespread ecological destruction — some of the very misfortunes that they're supposed to prevent," Goklany wrote in the New York Post. "In our haste to address global warming, we have yet to think seriously about our policies' unintended effects."

In his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich warned of famine and mass starvation from overpopulation. Ironically, that might yet occur, not from overpopulation, but from overzealousness in trying to save Earth from a nonexistent threat.

Happy Earth Day, Al.

From Sawdust To Gasoline In Two Minutes?

It's the holy grail - converting cellulose to fuel. It's been done.

Reporting in the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.

In the same issue, James Dumesic and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison announce an integrated process for creating chemical components of jet fuel using a green gasoline approach. While Dumesic's group had previously demonstrated the production of jet-fuel components using separate steps, their current work shows that the steps can be integrated and run sequentially, without complex separation and purification processes between reactors.

Benchtop is one thing. Economically feasible is another.

Maybe Now We Can Get Rid Of Ethanol

Ethanol has made for good politics in Iowa, but it's terrible for the economy. Nevertheless, politicians continued to hype ethanol as the answer to all out energy and environmental woes.

Except, it's not. In fact, it's far worse for the environment than fossil fuels.

[I]ncredibly, when the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline. In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol "pays back" the carbon released by land-use change. As they say, it's not easy being green.

Maybe now we can start down a more sensible road.