When You’ve Lost Grist On Corn Ethanol……

….you’ve lost the backing of one of the Internet’s most hysterical (both meanings of the word) enviroweenie/climate alarmist websites: Government-backed corn ethanol lurches on, paving a road to nowhere

During the Bush II administration, I used to groan that the closest thing we had to a concerted policy response to climate change was the federal government’s slew of goodies for corn-based ethanol. It was a monumentally depressing situation, because propping up corn-derived fuel is expensive and (despite industry hype) doesn’t actually do much, if anything at all, to mitigate climate change — but contributes actively to ecological disasters like the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone.”

Now, two years into the Obama administration, we still have no concerted policy response to climate change, and the corn ethanol program abides, sucking up resources that could be going to actual green technologies. Groan.

I’ve got news for you, Chump: blaming Bush is idiotic, when Obama himself is a huge supporter of corn ethanol. Furthermore, Clinton supported corn ethanol, and, that was about the extent of his caring about globull warming. Remember, he refused to sign Kyoto, because it would destroy the US economy. Given a chance, Clinton might have signed legislation banning Obama, because Obama would destroy the US economy. Anyhow, what is Tom Philpott really mad about?

To me, the insane thing here isn’t the idea of government investment in public infrastructure; we meed much more of that. What galls me is the demand for government investment in ecologically useless public infrastructure — when we actually need to be investing much more in real green transportation systems like high-speed trains, powered by an energy grid shifted as much as possible over to wind and solar energy.

So, it’s not that the Government is spending foolish amounts of money turning food into fuel, along with government requirements to do that, which drives up food prices overall and is, by some reports, actually worse for “climate change” than pure fossil fuel usage. No, it’s that we don’t have friggin’ high speed trains which few will actually take.

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