Monday, August 11, 2008
By Ruth Ann Dailey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
All the political posturing, flip-flopping, maneuvering and compromising on national energy policy in recent days brings to mind an old bit of verse:
"Oh what tangled webs arise when first we start to subsidize ..."
That's what Sir Walter Scott might have written, anyway, if he'd had a glimpse of America's energy policy mess: Both the presidential candidates and certain powerful senators hold far different strands of this tangled web than their party affiliations would lead voters to expect.
And bcecause new energy bills and changing campaign promises can dramatically affect prices at the gas pump, on the commodities market and at the grocery store, it's a snarl that voters need to unravel long before November.
What's located at the tangled center is not just a barrel of oil, but a bushel of corn.
Where do the candidates stand on energy policy?
Democrat Barack Obama is a strong proponent of ethanol, an alternative fuel produced mainly, in the United States, from corn.
Months before his big win in the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Obama attended the opening of a new ethanol-processing plant there and gave the trendy fuel what The New York Times called "a ringing endorsement."
He caused a brief controversy early in his first Senate term by accepting subsidized flights on corporate planes -- twice from Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation's biggest ethanol producer and is based in his home state, Illinois, the nation's second-largest corn-producing state.
By contrast, Republican John McCain wants to eliminate "the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed," the Times reported.
"As a free-trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane," which is much more energy efficient and cheaper to produce.
As of early June, neither candidate had received large donations from ethanol executives or advocates.
But given the candidates' positions, The Wall Street Journal says experts are speculating that for the first time in many years, the reliably Republican "farm vote" may go to the Democrat this November.
Long before the federal government began subsidizing ethanol, it was subsidizing corn.
This policy was instituted during the Great Depression to keep farmers financially afloat with loans to store the excess crops that citizens were too poor to buy.
The Nixon administration radically changed this approach, shifting subsidies away from the farmer and toward the crop, from loans to direct payments, thereby favoring giant agribusiness over the small farm.
Through three decades of these huge subsidies, the American diet has become ever more corn-based, and now, as ethanol mandates push up food prices, the working poor will be the hardest hit.
The impact on the environment has been enormous, too.
Growing nitrogen-sucking corn crops requires huge amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers.
As journalist Michael Pollan notes in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "it takes more than a calorie of fossil-fuel energy to produce a calorie of [corn]."
The fertilizer-heavy runoff from countless Midwest cornfields travels down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, where the resulting nitrogen imbalance, Mr. Pollan writes, has created a "dead zone the size of the state of New Jersey."
When you also consider the dangers of a "monoculture" -- Mr. Pollan invokes the tragic upheaval of Ireland's potato famines -- it's clear that the push behind corn ethanol is potentially disastrous on several fronts.
Despite all this, the Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will not cut its quota for the use of ethanol in cars, saying that reducing the nation's reliance on oil -- a security issue -- outweighs economic or environmental concerns (only the last of which is properly the EPA's purview).
Here's just how tangled our subsidized web has become: We have a Democratic presidential candidate who supports an agribusiness-friendly, environmentally unsound fuel, who flip-flopped on tapping the nation's strategic petroleum reserves to lower gas prices while insisting new drilling won't have any similar effect, and who urges Americans to make sure their tires are properly inflated.
We have a Republican candidate who opposes big agribusiness on ethanol, supports competitive foreign imports, did an about-face on offshore drilling but won't (yet) approve careful drilling in the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
And we have 10 senators from both parties forging "compromise" on energy policy by throwing huge biofuel subsidies to their home states while undercutting any meaningful new drilling in the United States.
The tangled web would become even more confusing if we tried to introduce the oil companies' subsidies, too.
Those are by no means equally damaging, but they do help make analysis that much harder.
The only thing voters can easily deduce from this bipartisan mess is that the tangled web of subsidies is, like most webs, a trap.
Ruth Ann Dailey can be reached at rdailey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1733. More articles by this author
First published on August 11, 2008 at 12:00 am
By Ruth Ann Dailey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
All the political posturing, flip-flopping, maneuvering and compromising on national energy policy in recent days brings to mind an old bit of verse:
"Oh what tangled webs arise when first we start to subsidize ..."
That's what Sir Walter Scott might have written, anyway, if he'd had a glimpse of America's energy policy mess: Both the presidential candidates and certain powerful senators hold far different strands of this tangled web than their party affiliations would lead voters to expect.
And bcecause new energy bills and changing campaign promises can dramatically affect prices at the gas pump, on the commodities market and at the grocery store, it's a snarl that voters need to unravel long before November.
What's located at the tangled center is not just a barrel of oil, but a bushel of corn.
Where do the candidates stand on energy policy?
Democrat Barack Obama is a strong proponent of ethanol, an alternative fuel produced mainly, in the United States, from corn.
Months before his big win in the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Obama attended the opening of a new ethanol-processing plant there and gave the trendy fuel what The New York Times called "a ringing endorsement."
He caused a brief controversy early in his first Senate term by accepting subsidized flights on corporate planes -- twice from Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation's biggest ethanol producer and is based in his home state, Illinois, the nation's second-largest corn-producing state.
By contrast, Republican John McCain wants to eliminate "the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed," the Times reported.
"As a free-trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane," which is much more energy efficient and cheaper to produce.
As of early June, neither candidate had received large donations from ethanol executives or advocates.
But given the candidates' positions, The Wall Street Journal says experts are speculating that for the first time in many years, the reliably Republican "farm vote" may go to the Democrat this November.
Long before the federal government began subsidizing ethanol, it was subsidizing corn.
This policy was instituted during the Great Depression to keep farmers financially afloat with loans to store the excess crops that citizens were too poor to buy.
The Nixon administration radically changed this approach, shifting subsidies away from the farmer and toward the crop, from loans to direct payments, thereby favoring giant agribusiness over the small farm.
Through three decades of these huge subsidies, the American diet has become ever more corn-based, and now, as ethanol mandates push up food prices, the working poor will be the hardest hit.
The impact on the environment has been enormous, too.
Growing nitrogen-sucking corn crops requires huge amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers.
As journalist Michael Pollan notes in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "it takes more than a calorie of fossil-fuel energy to produce a calorie of [corn]."
The fertilizer-heavy runoff from countless Midwest cornfields travels down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, where the resulting nitrogen imbalance, Mr. Pollan writes, has created a "dead zone the size of the state of New Jersey."
When you also consider the dangers of a "monoculture" -- Mr. Pollan invokes the tragic upheaval of Ireland's potato famines -- it's clear that the push behind corn ethanol is potentially disastrous on several fronts.
Despite all this, the Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will not cut its quota for the use of ethanol in cars, saying that reducing the nation's reliance on oil -- a security issue -- outweighs economic or environmental concerns (only the last of which is properly the EPA's purview).
Here's just how tangled our subsidized web has become: We have a Democratic presidential candidate who supports an agribusiness-friendly, environmentally unsound fuel, who flip-flopped on tapping the nation's strategic petroleum reserves to lower gas prices while insisting new drilling won't have any similar effect, and who urges Americans to make sure their tires are properly inflated.
We have a Republican candidate who opposes big agribusiness on ethanol, supports competitive foreign imports, did an about-face on offshore drilling but won't (yet) approve careful drilling in the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
And we have 10 senators from both parties forging "compromise" on energy policy by throwing huge biofuel subsidies to their home states while undercutting any meaningful new drilling in the United States.
The tangled web would become even more confusing if we tried to introduce the oil companies' subsidies, too.
Those are by no means equally damaging, but they do help make analysis that much harder.
The only thing voters can easily deduce from this bipartisan mess is that the tangled web of subsidies is, like most webs, a trap.
Ruth Ann Dailey can be reached at rdailey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1733. More articles by this author
First published on August 11, 2008 at 12:00 am
