Guns for Oil
Wall Street Journal
May 7, 2008; Page A18
Speaking of energy (see here), we can’t help but give more attention to a recent press release from some of the Senate’s leading liberals. Charles Schumer, Byron Dorgan, Bernie Sanders, Bob Casey and Mary Landrieu are demanding that President Bush tell OPEC nations to increase their oil supplies or risk losing arms deals with the United States. The Senators say U.S. consumers need the price relief that only increased oil production can…
National Review Online, Planet Gore
May 5, 2008
Food for Fuel Is No Laughing Matter [Marlo Lewis]
Cliff May begins his NRO column, “The Hunger,” by retelling an old joke about astronomers discovering a giant meteor hurtling towards Earth and the Washington Post running a headline: “World to end tomorrow: minorities and poor to suffer most.” While it is fine to make light of the media’s tendency to paint any change in market conditions as a class issue, in this case the joke doesn’t work.…
‘Let Them Burn Ethanol’
by Iain Murray (more by this author)
Human Events, April 30, 2008
American grocery stores are starting to introduce food rationing. Wal Mart is restricting the amount of rice customers can buy. In Mexico and Yemen, in Egypt and Indonesia, the poor are taking to the streets to protest massive rise in food prices as well as shortages. A short distance from our shores, the troubled nation of Haiti is in crisis again; Haitians, dependent on U.S. grain imports,…
From the Los Angeles Times
Food or fuel?
As global starvation worsens, the U.S. plans to devote vast amounts of grain to producing ethanol.
February 26, 2008
Something is very wrong with this picture: The United Nations’ World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel.
The astonishing callousness of burning…
A fine commentary by Robert Bryce. My one quibble is that the largest supplier of crude oil in the U.S. market is the United States–then Canada, then Mexico. This observation, of course, buttresses rather than detracts from Bryce’s point.
Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit
By Robert Bryce
Washington Post, Sunday, January 13, 2008; B03
With oil prices still flirting with $100 a barrel, everyone is talking about the need for “energy independence.” Late last year, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security…
I don’t know how I missed this one. Glad a colleague brought it to my attention. — Marlo
By Jerry Taylor
The closest thing we have to a state religion in America today isn’t
Christianity. It’s corn. Yet if this policy religion has merit, it doesn’t
need taxpayer subsidy. If it doesn’t have merit, no amount of subsidy will
bestow it.
October 12, 2007, 8:45 a.m.
Republicans Drunk on Ethanol
By The Editors, National Review
It’s a depressing ritual. Every four years, as Iowans prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential-primary season, candidates descend on the corn-covered state and discover the miraculous properties of ethanol. The latest convert is Fred Thompson, who voted against ethanol subsidies when he was a U.S. senator but now says that ethanol is “a matter . . . of national security.” What he means is that he…
“For the urban poor, food is usually the most significant expenditure, and when people can no longer afford bread, they tend to reach for stones.”
National Review Online, September 24, 2007
Biofueling Disorder
Food for thought.
By William Yeatman
Would you believe that the weather in Indiana could trigger popular unrest in China? Global demand for fuel made out of food is growing so fast that grain supplies are becoming dangerously thin. In this market, a hiccup in agricultural production - like a drought in…
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has published a study by Frances B. Smith on the unintended consequences of government policies to subsidize and mandate ethanol use. Actual or likely unwanted effects of political programs to promote ethanol production and consumption include:
A copy of the study may be obtained here.
…
