Al Gore: First generation ethanol - a mistake
Al Gore admitted earlier this month that the tax credit for ethanol was mistake. Everyone on the right jumped on his statement as further evidence of Mr. Gore’s hypocrisy.
Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle in an article at Real Clear Politics at Real Clear Politics reminds us that it was Mr. Gore who as Vice President in 1994 broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of the ethanol tax credit. This credit according to Saunders added $5 billion to the deficit last year.
The Wall St Journal wrote a somewhat sarcastic editorial earlier this month:
Welcome to the college of converts, Mr. Vice President. “It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Al Gore told a gathering of clean energy financiers in Greece this week. The benefits of ethanol are “trivial,” he added, but “It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”
No kidding, and Mr. Gore said he knows from experience: “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”
But was this an epiphany for Mr. Gore? The New York Times Green blog reports that:
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, Kalee Kreider, pointed out that the former vice president’s evolving feelings on first-generation biofuels - that is, corn ethanol - were not new, and that Mr. Gore discussed the matter at great length in Chapter 6 of his 2009 book, “Our Choice.”
There, Mr. Gore reflected on his early optimism for the potential of corn-based ethanol to help clean up the nation’s fuel sector - and the disappointment he now feels over its shortcomings:
I feel the disappointment personally because, as vice president of the United States in 1994, I cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of moving forward with a large national commitment to ethanol. In 1978, as a young congressman from a farming district in Middle Tennessee, I organized and hosted a daylong workshop on what was then called “gasohol” for 5,000 constituents, mostly farmers, eager to be a part of the national effort then under way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Throughout my 16 years in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, I was a persistent advocate of helping farmers to earn income from the production of alcohol fuels for cars and trucks. …
In practice, however, the results over the last several years have convinced many analysts that producing first generation ethanol from corn is a mistake.
Will we learn anything by Mr. Gore’s admission that ethanol subsidies are a mistake? Will government policy makers contemplate the unintended consequences of their policies? Those of us who believe that market forces rather than government policies lead to better choices still maintain (perhaps irrationally) a smidgen of hope.
Further reading:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/gore-annoys-corn-ethanol-lobby/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572404575634753486416076.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2307146884/
Copyright 2010 — K.J.Collins
