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The Problem With Ethanol
Podcast | May 14, 2008
TRANSCRIPT -- Please scroll down to listen to the podcast.
Don Irvine,
Chairman of Accuracy in Media: Welcome to another edition of the Media Monitor Podcast.
My guest today is Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst for energy and the
environment at The Heritage Foundation. Ben, you recently wrote an article
about ethanol and other bio-fuels, and how they’re being used as a solution to
global warming, and you don’t seem to be convinced that this is a very good
solution. Why?
Lieberman: Well I think we’re seeing with the ethanol
mandates a number of problems all converging. It was supposed to help reduce
prices at the pump, it’s not really doing that. Not a lot of people recognize
how much added pressure diverting food to fuel would have to food prices, but
we’re also seeing that as well. Plus a number of environmentalists have now
started to change their minds about ethanol. They are now arguing that when you
take everything into account, including the land that has to be cleared in
order to grow more corn for ethanol or more other crops for other fuel uses so-called
bio-fuels, that when you take all the environmental considerations into
account, that this is a net negative for the environment, including a net
negative when it comes to global warming emissions.
Irvine: You’re mentioning food prices. One of the things you
mentioned in your article is how environmentalists like to use food prices, or
as kind of a scare tactic I guess, or food supply more specifically. Is this
not true?
Lieberman: Yeah, well what we are learning right now is that
there are risks to global warming policies as well as risks to global warming
itself. One of the fears from global warming we were told is that in the future
we would see food shortages as the planet is less able to grow enough food, increase
droughts and so on and so forth, predicted in these global warming models would
adversely impact the food supply. Well we are not seeing that really, but what
we are seeing is the impact of global warming policy, these food-for-fuel
mandates, these bio-fuels mandates, as food is being diverted away from eating
and being used to put into our gas tanks. We are seeing some pressure on food
prices. You know I should note that there are some other factors going on as
well that have added pressure to food prices. But right now we are seeing
global warming policy in the form of these bio-fuels mandates actually contributing
to these food prices rather than alleviating them.
Irvine: Now one of the biggest proponents or at least in the
past, if not in the current state is Al Gore, in terms of the bio-fuels. Now he
was claiming I guess that these things would actually reduce energy use. But as
we were talking before that’s not really the case, is it?
Lieberman: No, in fact this is not really helping out much
in any regard. Ethanol came along with a lot of promises that it would do a lot
of things and so far it has not delivered on much of anything. And this is
another example of Al Gore hyping something and then changing his tune a little
bit later on. Now he is talking about the next generation of bio-fuels, the so-called
cellulosic ethanol. The attraction there is that if we could grow grasses on
marginal lands, things that wouldn’t be used for the food supply, and make
ethanol out of those, then we wouldn’t have this impact on the food supply but
there are a lot of problems, ecological and economic problems with moving to
celluslotical ethanol. That might prove to be just as much as a disappointment
as corn ethanol is turning out to be a disappointment.
Irvine: We seem to be going in the direction of just using
more and more bio-fuels. President Bush last year signed an energy bill which
has really committed the US to quite a standard. Can you explain that a little
bit and what impact that has on our economy?
Lieberman: Yeah, well I think there is a right way and a
wrong way to diversify away from petroleum and that is certainly something we
ought to be pursuing. There’s no question about that, but there’s a right way
and a wrong way to do it. I think the wrong way is government mandates, federal
efforts to pick winners and losers and then force those chosen winners on an
otherwise reluctant market place, and that’s what we’re doing with these ethanol
mandates that the president and the house and senate have enthusiastically
supported. As an aside, I think this is an example that bi-partisanship may not
be not all it’s cracked up to be because this is something that Democrats and Republicans
agreed upon but it’s turning out to be very troublesome, these ethanol mandates
.The problem with these ethanol mandates is not so much the ethanol part, but
the mandate part when the government demands that a certain amount be used
rather than letting the marketplace decide how much to be used. That’s where we’re really seeing the problems
and I think what we need, Democrat or Republican, is more of a respect for the
free market.
Irvine: Can you remind us, what did Bush commit us to in
terms of corn-based ethanol and usage?
Lieberman: What he was talking
about was 20 and 10. That we would get
up to 20% of our use of fuel from these sources by the year 2010. And what actually was enacted last December
was an ethanol mandate that requires, or renewable fuels mandate, but it’s
mostly met by corn ethanol, that will require 9 billion gallons this year, and
moving on up to 36 billion gallons by 2022.
And the scary thing is that we are already seeing some significant
problems at 9 billion gallons and yet we are only ¼ of the way towards our
final goal here.
Irvine: I was looking at Hillary
Clinton’s website. She has on there that
part of her agenda, or mandate I guess, is that she’d like to see us get up to
60 billion gallons of homegrown bio-fuels.
Is that even realistic?
Lieberman: Well we’re seeing such
problems right now at far lower levels, I would hope that she changes her mind
but we’ll never know. The reality is
that people like Hillary Clinton and others is that they think they know energy
better than anybody in the energy business and all they have to do is just mandate
alternatives, and that will solve our problems.
I think we’re seeing with the ethanol experience that it’s not so simple
and that really the role for government is to stay out of the way and not to
try to run energy markets.
Irvine: Would you say that Barack Obama or John
McCain will be much better on this position or situation.
Lieberman: We’ll have to wait and see. They’ll have to face the political and
economic realities. There’s public anger
over high energy costs. There’s the
reality—and it’s an anger over food costs—there’s the reality that ethanol
isn’t really helping out and so I hope that they have to face the political and
economic realities of ethanol and ethanol mandates which will only get more
problematic.
Irvine: And finally, and in kind
of conclusion, what do you see as our best solution overall?
Lieberman: I think our best
solution is to be open to any and all alternatives but to not have a role for
the federal government in picking winners and losers. We see that their attempt to pick ethanol as
a winner that actually was a loser.
We’re worse off for having gone down that road. Now eventually we’ll find alternatives to
petroleum, but those solutions are probably going to come from the free market,
not from Washington.
Irvine: Well thanks a lot. Your paper was extremely revealing, and I
really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today.
Lieberman: Sure, and thank you.
Irvine: And where should people go
if they want to download or review the paper online?
Lieberman: Well we have a lot of
information on energy and environmental issues at heritage.org.
Irvine: Alright, and thank you
once again, and for our listeners, please tune in next week for another edition
of the Media Monitor Podcast.
You can also download this podcast here as an MP3.
32 Comments | Post a Comment
Ditto on the comments wanting print. If AIM would have someone type out some of these important interviews that would really help to get the word out.
Ditto. I need the written word. Sorru, don’t do podcasts.
The others are right, I GREATLY PREFER text. Audio files take up too much room on disk, take up too much time to ingest, and are not as acceptable to some of the folks to which I forward stuff-like-this. Yes, it costs money to hire somebody to transcribe audio to text, but it is really worth it.
Kindly provide text for us.
John
Yes, please send text, All other podcasts sources as well. Kenjyn
Ditto to all the above comments! Sounds like there might be a lot of us out here whose “high speed” connection sometimes creeps - let along the memory hog the podcast is.
PLEASE give us a text article. In the time it takes for the audio file to load and play, I could read 10 short articles. Plus, it’s easier to share with others, and they are more likely to check into the information if they can quickly skim/read text.
Thanks!
Actually I don’t mind the podcast, my only criticism being that the sound volume is too low. I have to turn my device up almost all the way in order to hear it. When the next item in queue comes up it can be eardrum shattering!
Please print text for podcasts. I don’t have time to listen. Reading is much faster.
While I agree with the text crowd, all of the downsides of ethanol were largely available WAY before our elected officials (the children) jumped into this quicksand with both feet, much as the Global Warming hoax, now known as “Climate Change” because none of the warming has been substantiated; our pols simply decided to play God, with the ability to change something that’s been going on for as long as the earth has existed: climate change.
This reflects DC’s utter inability to grasp difficult issues, such as which day follows Friday?
I note with dismay that the spineless slugs (the GOP) have caved to the pinkos (the “progressive” libs) to waller in the mud (well, taxpayer dollars might be the more apt term) with both of these hoaxes.
Oh, and Al Gore finally admits that he stands to make a lot of money off of all this through green investments. The word “charity” may be foreign to the Tin Man, but he is familiar with the term “profit.”
Ironically, Tipper Gore drew a lot of heat when she went after the corrupted music industry, which has replaced music with noise and filth. (She, of course, backed off of her crusade when Al started his unsuccessful quest for the presidency.) Note that the listenable artists these days have songs that would have sounded right at home in the 60s or 70s, while country music has become “Country Music for Those Who Don’t Like Country Music.” If someone’s going to make a rational prediction of impending disaster, Tipper has a better record than Algore.
We’ve been screwed by DC from both sides on both issues.
Libs, feel free to respond. I find your nonsense quite amusing, much like watching small children learning about the world around them, eg, take a bite of my mudpie, and I’ll give you a nickel. (The nickel is never forthcoming, while a mudpie is made of mud. This is basically how our gov’t works…or doesn’t, as the case may be and usually is.)
Go to Google search. type 4 words. WARMING OF SOLAR SYSTEM. Our LORD spoke of Cosmic Upheavals taking place. It is not humanity causing Global Warming.
I can read a lot faster than I can listen. Please make a printable transcript available so I can print and forward it.
Erich Kern
Murrieta, CA
Listening to writers speak is often painful. It’s an incentive to read the book, methinks.
Thank you all for adding your comments to this forum. In response to the many requests for a written version, we have transcribed this interview and made the text available here.
~The AIM Team
Well done AIM! Thanks for the transcript!!
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, “I wanna grow up and be a critic.”
May 16 at 10:02 am | #1 | Link
I need a link to print not podcasts