Word came through late yesterday that as anticipated here
the White House caved to Senator Grassley, providing assurances America would
not be lifting its tariff on Brazilian ethanol anytime soon.
As interesting to me was that the Renewable
Fuels Association, which is not like many things in Washington what its name
suggests and does not support all renewable fuels just those produced by its
members, saw fit to issue a press release going after me and Andrew Sullivan
who graciously picked up some of what I had written on our corndog friends.
They accused me of being an international consultant (true) who has worked
closely with Brazil (also true). It
helps to work with different parts of the world to actually know what's going
on in them. In fact they characterized me as a Brazil nut. This hurt. Because I
actually am not a big fan of Brazil nuts. They then went on to say that there
are, despite my assertion to the contrary, credible experts who think corn
makes a shred of sense. They listed a number of reasons why corn would make
sense -- if you were just interested in using a feedstock that is already being
produced for which we already have fancy subsidy programs that comes from
states with a lot of political clout, for example. They also erroneously
suggest that Sullivan and I implied (which we did not) that corn only comes
from Iowa. In fact, I for one, know corn comes from lots of other places
including Hollywood and Washington flackeries. But perhaps my language was not
precise enough.
So let's toss the ball
right back at them. Please find a credible expert who believes that corn is the
best possible feedstock from which to make ethanol or that corn is actually a
more efficient source of energy than other feedstocks like sugarcane or likely
next generation feedstocks. Once you've
done that we can move on to the idea that subsidizing an industry with an
unsustainable model is in the U.S. national interest or that having U.S.
consumer pay more for fuel in the current economic environment is a good idea
or that protectionism is really the answer. Or better yet, perhaps we can move the discussion on to why the U.S.
continues to lavish subsidies on the ag business that distort world trade and,
very often, primarily offer a payday to corporate farms and well-to-do larger
farmers.
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