Ethanol, another stupid idea mandated by Washington

“Global warming is the biggest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it.”– Meteorologist and founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman.

I swear that if you gave a group of lawmakers a lawnmower they would assemble a snow-blower that stalled every 30 seconds. Such is the case of ethanol, an idea whose time should have never come.

When I was the editor for Outstanding Investments in the early 2000s, I sat down with my uncle who operated a mixed farm for decades. With the internet, a piece of paper, a pencil and his 42 years of farming experience, we set about finding the then-current price of ethanol. We did the same with oil from the pump jack to the gas tank and even included the average discovery cost. According to our numbers, a gallon of ethanol was twice as expensive as a gallon of gasoline. Well worth it, the hardcore greens would say, if you stopped them on their bicycles and asked them.

Late last month the Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced that biofuels, the major one being corn, are costly, take a long time to produce (a growing season to be exact) and will neither make America less dependent on Middle Eastern oil or lower CO2 emissions. For the price of a phone call I could have told them this 15 years ago.

But the last thing the government wants is input from the public, even if it is correct. Their way creates a whole new program, in this case the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program, which has set a grandiose target of 857 billion barrels by 2022, something that the GAO now says is impossible. You would have thought somebody would have said you would need to plant 80 percent of cropland in the United States to hit that target, but nobody did. The GAO’s conclusion: “There is not nearly enough of this fuel to meet the program’s targets — nor will there likely be enough in the near future.”

But this is the kicker; research by the government found out that biofuels emit more carbon dioxide than gasoline!

Nowhere could I find the number of people working for the RFS, but they are eating high off the taxpayer’s hog. From 2013 through 2015 the federal government plowed more than $1.1 billion into research and development of advanced biofuels. It is mind boggling to think about how much money the RFS has gone through since its creation in 2005. Enough money that it would help rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure or, as a neocon would measure it, enough to buy an aircraft carrier, planes and all. And that is not even the worst of it. More than half the corn grown in America is used for ethanol, taking up 50,000 acres that could be used for corn which makes up 95 percent of the total feed grain consumed by livestock. More corn thrown into the gas tank makes for higher corn prices at the table. And it is not just corn; the vast acreage for growing fuel, increases the price of beef, pork, poultry and even fish. Inflation across the country is offset by the deflation resulting from the $10 billion a year charged to motorists to pump watered down gasoline into the fuel tank.

If you didn’t think it could get any worse, it does. Ethanol added into gasoline results in up to 10 percent lower mileage. And as any hot rod driver will tell you, gas mixed with ethanol causes a noticeable reduction in performance.

Chet Thompson, president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, stated the obvious; that the EPA plan is “completely detached from market realities and confirms once again that congress must take immediate action to remedy this broken program.”

This will be an early test for President-elect Donald Trump. Either he supports grain growers or the petroleum producers. If he is honest in making the best deals he can for America, the dollars and cents equation and not lobbyist arguments will dictate the cessation of biofuels immediately.

This dog won’t hunt

Unfortunately biofuels are just one chink in the Green’s armor. The fundamental fact would strip them naked if there is no man-made climate change. This should be borne out by the fact that temperatures have not risen in the past 15 years and the temperatures that over the past couple of decades are well within the ranges earth has had over the past millennial.

If you have had the misfortune to see Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, for which he has received every award except the Medal of Honor, you might remember the segment where, across this gigantic screen behind him, CO2 levels and the earth’s temperatures going back 900,000 years is said to be shown. Gore points out that as CO2 increases so does the earth’s temperature. Not so say many scientists, most of them retired and therefore not in fear of losing their jobs if they speak out against climate change.

What they point out in Gore’s two lines is that it is temperatures that lead CO2 levels. This is such a small inconvenient truth for the former vice president who is a perfect crusader for the globalists to push their agenda for less independence and greater interdependence around the globe. For the past eight years he has had a lot of support from the world’s most powerful voice, President Barack Obama. Just weeks after ISIS had murdered 130 people in a series of attacks in France in 2015 Obama said: “Today, there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change.”

Funny, but most people would think that someone with a black balaclava and an AK-47 is a little more worrisome than a government-spun weather fantasy.

On its face climate change is nothing but a ridiculous fairy tale and people would know that if they invested less than an hour in reading the facts.

According to Skeptical Science, Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans. Ian Pilmer, renown Australian geologist and a professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, contends that, “Over the past 250 years, humans have added just one part of CO2 in 10,000 to the atmosphere. One volcanic cough can do this in a day.”

None of which distracts Gore who has a complete ignorance of science but is well-informed on building personal wealth. Gore grew up rich on Washington’s Embassy Row and then went on to Harvard where he avoided not only the Vietnam draft but also math. After losing an election he went on to make $200 million selling his sky-is-falling routine. And it’s an easy sell.

Obama pulls a number out of a hat that says that 99.5 percent of scientists agree that there is man-made climate change. I doubt you can get 99.5 percent of any group to agree on anything, even the best way to make toast. It is a made up number.

It was a questionnaire mailed to several hundred scientists or quasi scientists, of which only a third replied.

And consider this, one that even the Greens cannot dispute, are the facts stated in the March 27, 2009, issue of The Daily Signal:

Out of the entire atmospheric makeup, only one to two percent is made up of greenhouse gases with the majority being nitrogen (about 78 percent) and oxygen (about 21 percent). Of that two percent, “planet-killing” carbon dioxide comprises only 3.62 percent while water vapor encompasses 95 percent. And of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, humans cause only 3.4 percent of annual CO2 emissions. What does this all boil down to?

The truth is climate change has become a religion and an extremist one at that. Some of the behavior of hard core environmentalists is similar to Islam.

According to a March 11 article in London’s Sunday Telegraph:

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five death threats since he started questioning man’s impact on climate change. Richard Lindzen, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, said, “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges.” Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said, “Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system.”

But you will not find these facts on climate change because the mainstream media, like Obama and other former presidents, answer to the globalists.

It is hard to believe that 45 years after Watergate we trust the president of the United States. I suppose it is easier that way and, after all, society provides enough narcotics in pills, booze, weed, gambling and sports we just don’t care. Like the Jews that must have known they were being taken to their death, it had to help that they believed Germany would not do such a thing.

Soon we will know which side of the road Trump is on. Will he be independent and sign laws that make things better for Americans, or will he be a figurehead for the nefarious globalists? Two things should tell us the answer early next year: Trump’s decision on the Keystone Pipeline and whether the Trump administration allows for the spending of billions of dollars combating climate change, something that exists but has nothing to do with man.

Yours in good times and bad,

— John Myers

Sources:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/joachim-hagopian/global-warming-hoax/

http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/28/govt-admits-ethanol-mandates-are-expensive-and-failing/

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background/

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/supercut-obama-calls-climate-change-not-terrorism-our-greatest-threat/

https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

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