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Wising Up To Demon Ethanol
By Mr Ethanol | April 3, 2008
The Star-Ledger:
Not to pick on Joe Pennacchio. The guy’s got enough problems. But the other night at the Mercer County Republican convention I listened as he gave one of those spiels that illustrates why American politicians can’t be trusted on the issue of energy.
First, the candidate for the GOP nomination to the U.S. Senate said he has a plan for the United States to become energy-independent. Wonderful. But a trip to the Energy Information Administration website http://www.eia.doe.gov/ reveals we now import about 13.5 million barrels of oil a day.
That’s close to two-thirds of the oil we use. There is no way the U.S. could find that much oil by drilling domestically. The only way to achieve energy independence would be to cut back drastically on consumption.
Yet the senator then went on to blast Jimmy Carter for trying to do just that. Carter reacted to the energy crisis of the late 1970s by urging people to turn down their thermostats and drive their cars less. Carter may have done a lot of things wrong, but only a fool could deny that he was prescient in urging energy conservation.
The other night Pennacchio was that fool. Anyone who pays any attention to statistics in the field of energy - a group that seems to include me and no one else I know - would have to acknowledge that energy independence is a near-impossibility even if we drilled every spot in America, turned our thermostats down to 60, and all drove Toyota Priuses. Even then we’d be importing oil.
It is this sort of demagoguery that led to the ethanol scam. The typical American is dumb enough to believe politicians when they say we can end imports by using “alternative fuels.” The politicians supporting alternative fuels never fail to recite that line about how, “If we can put a man on the moon, we can develop an alternative to gasoline,” as Pennacchio did the other night. Continue reading.
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