The Senate voted today to keep subsidizing ethanol. I promised I would get to my hatred of the corn-based petroleum substitute, and then this story appeared as the answer to my prayer to the mighty Thog (He’s a lot like Thor, but for blogs). The reasons I hate ethanol are myriad, but my main problem with it is what it does to food prices. Ethanol, as I astutely pointed out above, is made from corn. Corn is made into many useful products, including food for people, and food for livestock, which become food for people. Corn is, in short, awesome. Ethanol production takes corn that could be fed to people and livestock and burns it. It creates an artificial demand for corn that raises the price of it (I’m cutting into my colleague’s territory here, but bear with me for a second). Raising the price of raw corn raises the price of corn meant for human and livestock consumption, and so raises the price of most foods at the supermarket[1]. The amount it raises the price is probably noticeable, but still not enough to give the average family a real kick in the pocketbook. But for low-income people and people on government assistance this is a real problem. These people either have to buy less food, or the government has to increase the amount it spends per person on assistance. Doing away with the subsidy for ethanol will save the federal government money and will help reduce the cost of food.
The sooner we stop kidding ourselves about ethanol and realize it’s a horrible idea, the sooner we can move on to finding real, viable alternatives to foreign oil. Corn for ethanol is grown on land that could be used for wind turbines, solar panels, and nuclear reactors. Far from allowing us to move on to real answers to our problems, ethanol is keeping us in a dark age and it is high time we set it adrift on an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
[1] Since everything has corn in it. Seriously, go to your fridge and look. I defy you to find five packaged items that don’t contain corn.
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