We first saw negative effects of our global market meddling when 75,000 starving Mexicans began rioting:
Poor Mexicans rely on tortillas for their diet. And a lot of other poor people in a lot of other places rely on other foodstuffs made from corn.
The problem is ethanol. Ethanol, that fuel additive that reduces pollution and helps us wean our dependency on foreign oil and makes farmers rich and politicians look silly when they stump in Iowa. As the U.S. adds more ethanol to its gasoline, the price of corn is surging dramatically, leading to extreme market volatility.
Now government subsidies for alternative fuels have caused a sobering increase in the cost of beer in Germany due to the unnatural shrinkage of barley production. Why is barely production lower and beer more expensive? The farmers are switching production so they can get more government alternative fuel subsidies.
Germans will have to dig deeper in their pockets to enjoy their beloved beer in the next few months as barley is increasingly displaced in the country’s fields by heavily subsidized crops used for biofuels.
…
Brewers and farmers say an extremely poor barley harvest in 2006 has exacerbated an emerging trend of converting barley fields to growing the plants used in biofuels, such as rapeseed. The amount of land used for growing barley in Germany is receding by 5 percent a year.
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But the price of barley, which is used to make malt, an essential ingredient in brewing, has doubled in the space of a year from 200 to 400 euros per ton on the German market.
The cost of bread will increase another 10% due to these subsidies as well according to the article. Governments all over the world are sinking trillions into Ethanol and other alternative fuels for what? Increased hunger, less merriment and more pollution! The latest Stanford study, ignored by the mass media, proves the prevalence of increased pollution from ethanol:
Switching to E85 blends (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) could result in slightly higher ozone-related mortality, hospitalization, and asthma (9% higher in Los Angeles and 4% higher in the U.S. as a whole), the study finds. Cancer rates would be similar for gasoline and E85.
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The result: more ozone and about 185 more deaths per year across the U.S.
The hyperbolic environmental soothsayers on the left and in the media have swayed our government into investing large sums of money into these technologies that have turned out to be counterproductive. When will we learn to trust the market? Shareholders and private citizens are best left alone to judge the correct production of a good, the heavy hand of the government only serves to distort the market and destroy any progress towards the end goal.
HT: Scott Genz
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Brandon, please don’t blame everybody that is an “environmentalist” for feeding the ethanol mania. The contributors to Grist, for example, are largely sceptical of — indeed, hostile to — current support policies for biofuels in the USA and elsewhere. In many environmental NGOs the internal debates over what stance to take on biofuels are heated; one insider described the atmosphere as similar to a “circular firing squad”.
Moreover, this is not a left-right issue. The ethanol lobby is supported by a diverse rainbow of interests, from national security hawks on the right (who believe ethanol will reduce dependence on foreign oil) to rural populists, as well as cynics among the environment profession who like biofuels because they get “renewable fuels” for free (as they see it), without drawing on the U.S. Department of Energy budget. And let’s not forget the carmakers, who benefit from generous credits against their CAFE standards for every flex-fuel (E85-capable) vehicle they manufacture, whether or not the vehicles ever touch a drop of ethanol once they leave the dealer’s lot.
Our own organization, the Global Subsidies Initiative of the International Institute for Sustainable Development published a critical analysis of subsidies to ethanol and biodiesel in the United States last October, and will soon be issuing similar analyses of subsidies to biofuels in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the EU and Switzerland.
Who supports protecting corn-based ethanol from sugar-based ethanol imports? Republican John Thune. http://www.salon.com/tech/htww.....index.html
Doesn’t every politician support ethanol?
John Thune is from a state that produces a lot of corn… why wouldn’t he protect his farmers from outsiders?
SPET3R writes, “John Thune [R] is from a state that produces a lot of corn… why wouldn’t he protect his farmers from outsiders?”
Well, if that is what we expect out of our politicians, then there is no hope of eliminating economically and environmentally distorting subsidies and tariffs. As an editorial in Scripts News comments today, “Two years ago, Sens. Dianne Feinstein [D] and Barbara Boxer [D] helped vote down a bipartisan bill to reduce farm subsidies, apparently because it would reduce aid for California rice and cotton farmers.” I guess by SPET3R’s logic, our reaction should be just to shrug and say, “Well, why wouldn’t they?”
The propensity to sacrifice the greater good in the service of narrow, vested interest is independent of party affiliation. Creating the conditions for positive change starts with demanding more noble behavior from our elected leaders.
[...] Place: GOP3 Alternative Fuel Subsidies Cause Sober Germans, Starving Mexicans, More [...]
I think the largest peril in cases such as this isn’t that an industry is making biofuels pushed on by government. As long as there is actual, sensible need for such things then why not encourage it? (I don’t think Global Warming is a sensible need, though, due to the manufactured nature of the ‘scientific’ conclusions.) The problem is that knee jerk reactions from ignorant activists blasted by the media radically reworked a system of crop growth and sales that now has sad results worldwide. If we are going to change the world, we should do it slowly with due care to avoid such problems.
[...] post in today’s Global Warming Update. “This is from GOP3.com, a website: “Alternative Fuel Subsidies Cause Sober Germans, Starving Mexicans, More Pollution. — ‘Poor Mexicans rely on tortillas for their diet. And a lot of other poor people in a [...]
I disagree with you Ron. I’m not saying that Government should mandate ethanol or continue any subsidies. However the amount of jobs that are being created from the now rapidly growing ethanol industry is amazing. Stop and think. The areas that are now producing this fuel were once depressed areas of Wisconsin– recently thats turning around. I know that this issue isn’t great for the Milwaukee area but out in Western Wisconsin were corn is grown, its really helping the economy there where otherwise there was no hope of recovery. The same thing is happening in areas of southern Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota.
Senator Thune understands the importance of growing these local economies that is one reason why he supports ethanol aside from the fact its an alternative fuel. South Dakota has a lot of corn and lots of open land to do it. Senator Thune has a track record of supporting the growth of local economies… look at the DM&E railroad issue which he strongly supports– which will affect our energy as it relates to electricity. I don’t know why you’re so against it other than you have an agenda against ethanol– which I understand where you’re coming from. Its not efficiently produced and it actually reduces fuel miles. But eventually the idea is to produce it using Methane natural gas or coal gasification and tractors that use bio diesel.
You’re an idiot if you think liberals and environmentalists support ethanol. The problem is politicians of both parties who put there own constituents first before the good of the rest of the nation and the world. Oh, and I don’t know what media you watch (too much Fox News I suspect),, but I have seen numerous reports of the pollution and health problems of ethanol.
I do not claim to know a lot about politics, but what I do study is science. As an environmentalist who does support ethanol I can say that of course ethanol releases pollution when burned. Environmentalists never claimed that it didn’t. What they do claim is that ethanol, unlike gasoline, is carbon neutral. This means that whatever greenhouse gasses it emits are taken in during the growth of the plant and therefore total emissions are zero.
One more thing, biodiesel is very different compared to ethanol so please don’t use this Stanford article to criticize it.
I never said anything about biodiesel… I was referencing ethanol in the Stanford study quotation. This article was meant to address the whole range of negative externalities that are resulting from alternative fuel subsidies, not debate the pros and cons of any given technology. In fact, if a given technology is superior, it should succeed in the market without government subsidies.
Someone is scan reading and picked up “biodiesel” since its the last word of my post. BIOdeisel will become very important when it comes to the growing of corn… since manure and other bi-products of agriculture can be used to produce it.
When Ethanol is brought up, it’ll always result in a huge debate and its not along party lines. There is an issue happening in Sparta and in Ridgeville right now with an Ethanol plant… Pollution is the concern there and the construction of these plants raise controversies.
First thing, I’m sorry about the biodiesel comment, it was directed at the other comments, not your article.
Second, occasionally it is necessary to subsidize “inferior” technologies.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/A.....farm.bill/
That wasn’t the first bill either… I think there was another one that specifically later (in 2005??) which addressed Ethanol, Methanol and the production of BIOdiesal.
[...] 11:24 AM Brandon: He just stated that he has been asked to join the Committee on Environmental Impact and Global Warming or as Republican’s call it, the “Hot Air Committee”. For more information on all the hot air from the left on environmental alarm-ism, check out this post. [...]