Marginal News on Energy

Well the Senate has at least done something this week in passing the revised CAFE standard. It boost the mileage requirement for cars and light trucks(including SUV's) to 35MPG by 2020. I guess we are going to have to live with this for a while but it is the first increase in nearly 20 years. Seems a little then though when we know that there are vehicles on the road right now that get over 50 and as much as 100 mpg. I guess you take what you can get and wait for the next election.

The bad news is, because of a GOP filibuster threat the 30 billion dollar tax increase on Big Oil didn't pass. This increase in taxes would have paid for research into renewable sources of energy. Leave it to the Rethugs to bow down before their masters and refuse to tax these highly profitable companies.

The really bad news is that the new energy bill includes incentives for Big Agriculture and the ethanol producers to increase production of ethanol to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022. This is a sevenfold increase. This is a huge mistake and a big giveaway to companies like ADM who make a boatload of money from ethanol and then turn around and take the tax breaks. All this is going to come out of our pockets in continued high taxes in increasing prices for foods such as chicken, beef and milk which are heavily dependent on corn for their production. Don't even think about the increasing cost and availability of corn on the third world. Estimates are that an additional 25 million people globally have been pushed over the starvation line by the increased cost of corn already. Multiply by seven.

The tragedy in this is that producing ethanol from corn is a net energy loser. Corn requires more nitrogen fertilizer that any other crop and nitrogen fertilizer is produced from oil. Add together all the costs of production and the oil used in producing the fertilizer for the corn and you end up in the red. The only winners in this are the big industrial corn growers and the processors like ADM.

The house is fudging with their version and of course we still have to get numbnuts to sign the compromise bill. To early to chill the champagne.