In the latest evidence of the lies and treason of the environmental left, the global warming scam fueled biofuel craze has now been shown to actually generate MORE carbon emissions than fossil fuels when the total process' emissions are counted. The study, cited in a New York Times article, points to the fact that the land cleared for production of biofuels alone generates "93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land", among other production and transportation emissions which, taken together, belie the claim that the efforts by Congress to interfere in the markets on behalf of the planet are doing anything other than expanding the scope and control of government into our lives to make our decisions for us. For those liberals who value their perceived status among their peers in terms of their environmental credentials, this information will undoubtedly be ignored, but for the rest of us "green elephants" a hard look at environmental fact and fiction is in order to generate real environmental policy.

The darling of the biofuels craze, ethanol, was a corn farmer's subsidy packaged as an eco-friendly big government solution in search of a problem from the start. At a little over $2.20 per gallon of gasoline replaced, this seemingly efficient fuel benefits from massive government subsidies (and since the government produces no money of its own, it benefits from your subsidies) amounting to "7 billion dollars" during fiscal year 2006 and yielding 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol. This amounts to a subsidy of $1.45 per gallon of ethanol produced, making ethanol hardly more cost effective than standard gasoline. Furthermore, as congress continues to meddle in the energy markets, energy companies are starting to invest not in increased refining capacity to meet our needs, but in new equipment to meet the expectedly increasing demands of an activist congress which has broken the markets system of allocating resources to the chagrin of all when filling their tank. If this weren't bad enough, the ripple effects of the massive corn subsidies are changing the relative prices of other farmed commodities, causing increased prices for meat, corn, wheat, hops, and virtually every other farmed good to increase as the supply of land devoted to food production shrinks in favor of ethanol production.


Inflation numbers are often reported in two categories: all consumer goods, and consumer goods excluding food and energy. The reason for this is that food and energy prices tend to be both more volatile, and they tend to react faster to economic shocks than other comoddities, since we buy these goods more frequently than any other item in our lives. With government mandated ethanol production, both food prices and energy prices are increasing at faster rates than they would in a truly free market, thus increasing the rate of real inflation, driving down consumer spending in other sectors of the economy, and depressing bond yields which are by definition valued in terms of our expectations of future inflation. These ripple effects leave no corner of the economy untouched, from the bond market to the housing market to the environment.

Of course, as these prices rise more land is being converted into cropland in order to satisfy the joint demands of the US congress and the people. Some of this land is scrub land, and some is rain forest, both of which represent a carbon absorbing "sponge" which will no longer be retrieving carbon form the atmosphere. Additionally, the favored method of burning the land to prepare for planting in and of itself generates sufficient carbon that it would take "93 years" of ethanol production to offset the carbon produced by this action, according to Joseph Fargion, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy.


But as alarming as these findings are, and given that the authors of the recent studies felt it necessary to send letters to the Bush administration and leaders in congress, the mandatory biofuels supporters like Nicholas Nuttall say they "don’t want a total public backlash that would prevent us from getting the potential benefits". Congress has mandated that 15% of all transport fuels are to be made from biofuels by 2022, an astonishing increase from the current levels; and after paying an additional 3.6 billion at the pump in 2006, not including the 7 billion in tax dollars spent on subsidies, we are now looking at tripling the amount of ethanol consumed domestically in the next 14 years.

The combined costs of this increase will be staggering. From high inflation, to expensive food, to poor returns on investments, to higher interest rates on home loans, to increasingly expensive fuel and worse than fossil fuels emissions; biofuels will not ever achieve the goal of energy independence or environmental protection. But does that mean we should throw up our hands and stop trying? Of course it doesn't, but our methodology needs to change. Already, just as happened during the Arab oil embargo of the 1970's, the high price of gasoline has pushed people, all by themselves, to move toward smaller and more fuel efficient cars. As a finite resource, we will adjust to the increasing relative scarcity of hydrocarbons through the market system, raising the fuel efficiency of our transportation and even finding alternative fuels when it ceases to be prohibitively expensive to do so. As someone who hikes, camps, fishes, and hunts more than the average person or "environmentalist" I have nothing short of a personal interest in preserving the outdoor lifestyle I enjoy to share with my (future) children. In my field (economics), pollution represents the classic example of what we term an externality: a cost or benefit attributable to an economic activity not reflected in the price of the goods or services being produced. One of the few instances in which I support government intervention in the market for any reason is to internalize externalities. A pollution tax system with tradeable credits (mitigated by a 1:1 ratio cut in other corporate taxes) would go further toward reducing our harmful emissions than any level of expenditure of our government money imaginable, but unfortunately when those in government attain their power and prestige not by empowering us to engage our problems ourselves but by using our shared challenges to further enslave us to an ideology of guilt and powerless incompetence, nothing is likely to actually get done.