Monday, April 28, 2008

Time to Ask the Candidates about Ethanol   [Edward John Craig]

Check out the piece on the ethanol-mandate disaster by Americans for Prosperity's Phil Kerpen and James Valvo on the homepage.

They note that "the government-subsidized burning of our food supply to create ethanol has both increased carbon dioxide emissions and driven up food prices at a startling rate" and join the growing chorus to end the mandate.

Add the fact that it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get out of it, and that it requires an enormous amount of another increasingly precious resource — water — in order to process this inefficient fuel, and you wonder how ethanol was ever considered green to begin with.

So who's going to pull a George Stephanopoulos, and ask Obama about his support for Third-World-starving ethanol policy, just ahead of the Indiana primary? [I had hoped it might be among George Will's questions for the Illinois senator in this week's Newsweek.]

[UPDATE: The L.A. Times is on it, though: see question 8.]

[UPDATE 2: The original version of this post read "it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get out of it," which hasn't been true for years. Mea culpa.] 

04/28 09:19 AMShare