Liberalguy

You Can’t Eat Bio-Fuel By Arnold Ahlert (bio)

For their own purposes, politicians in both parties would have us believe we are hopelessly divided on every serious issue this country faces. Baloney. Here’s an issue the overwhelming majority of Americans can get behind, regardless of their ideology: using our food supply to make fuel is an economic and moral abomination. Economically, food prices have gone through the roof, up 83% in the last three years according to the World Bank. And because farmers are lured by the higher prices paid for corn, they are switching out of such things as soybean and cattle production–making those commodities scarcer, therefore more expensive. Even worse, bio-fuels are grossly inefficient. It takes one gallon of fossil fuel to produce 1.3 gallons of bio-fuel–which is also 10% less efficient than gasoline. Morally speaking, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who gets hurt the most by spiking food prices: the poor, the hungry, the disadvantaged. People with kids struggling to make ends meet. Supermarkets and restaurants who employ thousands of Americans. In other words, just about everybody. And for what? Between the supply of domestic oil as yet untapped and alternative technologies on the horizon, our government’s determination to use corn to make fuel is a fool’s errand. Americans are being held hostage by a rouge’s gallery of politically-connected farmers, global warming boneheads and enviro-nazis all of whom have a vested interest in continuing this assault on common sense and common decency. Maybe they prefer a world in which our fuel supply is politically correct while our food supply becomes economically unsustainable, but the bet here is most Americans detest it–regardless of ideology. Our political ruling class should be very wary. Nothing focuses a man’s mind more than hunger.

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