Sunday, March 9, 2008
That's how Jeff Jacoby ends his piece today which covers ethanol, sub-prime loans and the law of unintended consequences: How government makes things worse
...The problem, laid out in two new studies in the journal Science, is that it takes a lot of land to grow biofuel feedstocks such as corn, and as forests or grasslands are cleared for crops, large amounts of CO2 are released. Diverting land in this fashion also eliminates "carbon sinks," which absorb atmospheric CO2. Bottom line: The government's ethanol mandate will generate a "carbon debt" that will take decades, maybe centuries, to pay off.
Actually, that's not quite the bottom line. Jacking up ethanol production causes other problems, too. Deforestation. Loss of biodiversity. Depletion of aquifers. More ethanol even means more hunger: As more of the US corn crop goes for ethanol, the price of corn has been soaring, a calamity for Third World countries in which corn is a major dietary staple.
Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa bloviates that "everything about ethanol is good, good, good," but it plainly isn't, isn't, isn't. The fate of ethanol, including how much of it is produced, should be determined by the decentralized process of free exchange - by the voluntary interactions of countless consumers and producers, buyers and sellers, each acting according to his best judgment and in his own best interest. Instead, Congress and the president, convinced as always that they know best, imposed a single, inflexible, ham-fisted directive from above. The result is that the carbon dioxide they aimed to reduce will be increased, and many people will suffer unnecessary misfortune...
The other day I received an email saying I should call my legislator and ask them to support something called The Global Warming Solutions Act, a bill in the Mass. legislature that appears to be all about creating another government bureaucracy in the name of the latest environmental fad. Dressed up in a lot of scientific-sounding language, the bill is clearly the result of foregone conclusions and pressure-group tactics rather than something for the serious collection of data for presentation and possible enactment of serious and useful policies. This is not a bill that will avoid the unintended consequences of ethanol production that Jacoby discusses above. If it were a serious effort, the language of the bill would spend far more time directing the DEP to assess the costs and drawbacks of any proposed reductions. It doesn't.
Update: Climate dissent grows hotter as chill deepens [h/t: Omnia]
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I got a laugh out of Jacoby's feint that the subprime mortgage collapse was a direct result of the CRA. If ever there's an example of fitting a problem into the mold of an ideology, he gives us a sterling example.