This op-ed in the Washington Post by Steven Mufson explains that no, oil probably was not the primary factor in going to war in Iraq, but it certainly was an important one. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that’s gone about as well as any of our other stated or unstated rationales for going to war.

What’s this, a mandatory requirement for 35 miles per gallon? Wow!

The bill’s centerpiece is the boost in the minimum fuel-efficiency standard for passenger vehicles, the first to be passed by Congress since 1975. It requires new auto fleets to average 35 miles a gallon by 2020, a 40 percent increase from today’s 25-mile average. By 2020, the measure could reduce U.S. oil use by 1.1 million barrels a day, more than half the oil exported by Kuwait or Venezuela and equivalent of taking 28 million of today’s vehicles off the road.

Is America going green? Eh, not so much. It pretty much works the same way current CAFE standards work. The average mileage of the entire line of vehicles an auto manufacturer produces will now have to meet 35 miles per gallon. That’s an increase of 10mpg over current standards, but, for example, if a company produces 2 vehicles, 1 SUV and 1 car, their average mileage must be 35 mgp. Does that require both vehicles averages go up? Nope. Let’s say that now, the SUV gets 20mpg while the car gets 30mpg. Average of 25. Ok, to increase that overall average to 35, you can either raise both numbers by 10mpg, or you can increase the car’s by 20 mpg, or any combination whatsoever that adds up to 20. And that would be fine, but the automaker can easily defeat this by producing 2 more lines of cars. Now, the SUV doesn’t have to raise its efficiency whatsoever, while the three cars absorb all the increase, like this: the SUV still only gets 25mpg, while three cars get 38.33mpg apiece. And you can spread that out even further by building more cars.

That would be all well and good, because it still causes the mileage to increase on the majority of cars, but it pisses me off that people who want to drive planet-killing vehicles get a free pass to continue doing so at will. Of course that doesn’t matter so much to me because the next time I buy a car I’ll be getting a hybrid, hopefully something that gets more than 40mpg. But still, we don’t need to allow gas-guzzlers that get 13mpg to even exist.

Anyway, this bill comes with a host of other revolutionary energy regulations:

The law says that at least 36 billion gallons of motor fuel a year should be biofuels by 2022, most of it in “advanced biofuels,” not a drop of which are commercially produced today.

[...]One portion of the bill sets new efficiency standards for appliances and will make the incandescent bulb — invented two centuries ago and improved and commercialized by Edison in the 1880s — virtually extinct by the middle of the next decade. The bill will phase out conventional incandescents, starting in 2012, with 100-watt bulbs, ultimately ceding the lighting market to more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

The commercial building industry could also be transformed by new incentives for energy-efficient windows, equipment and design. The federal government is supposed to make all of its buildings carbon-neutral through energy efficiency and clean energy use by 2030.

It’s a step in the right direction, but obviously doesn’t go far enough. We need more action on encouraging development of solar energy, plus we need to seriously end the wasteful extravigance of vehicles that get less than 25mpg. You’d think people would have been impressed by now with the importance of divorcing ourselves from oil, but no, once people get to the showroom it’s a question of their manhood or how safe a vehicle they can get for their kid (never mind that rollovers cause a disproportionate amount of fatalities).

There are provisions for both encouraging the growth of corn ethanol as well as further provisions for encouraging the transition from corn ethanol to other ethanols. One would hope these incentives work, but the legislation may not be strong or specific enough to see that it does.

Thankfully, Congress managed to avoid attaching any incentives for drilling for natural gas or oil domestically. While this bill is a great start, there’s still a ways to go.

Xanthippas forwarded me this blog post from Balloon Juice which links to a post over at The Agitator which finally results in a link to a WaPo article about the Sugar Lobby. If the idea that there is a lobby specifically for the sugar industry surprises you, it shouldn’t. Every major area of agriculture has their own lobby, and you probably have heard of the corn lobby. So anyway, I do suggest reading those blog posts and the original article. If I have time, I’ll get around to writing up a post about the evils of the sugar lobby (and the corn lobby), but what I want to respond to is some of the issues raised by Michael D. in his post. (Please don’t sue me for copyright infringement for copying and pasting your whole post!)

Radly Balko has some issues with U.S. sugar lobby (they’ll create a lobby for anything, won’t they?) I encourage you to read it and the accompanying Washington Post article. Radly sums it up as follows:

If an “alternative energy” source is so efficient that it needs massive government subsidy to event (sic) exist, much less survive, it’s not a viable long-term source of energy.

No kidding (and, by the way, it’s exactly what’s happening with the corn-based ethanol industry here.)

But look to Brazil – they’re doing just fine with sugar cane ethanol. In fact, Brazil has achieved what has eluded us forever – energy independence. In fact, three-quarters of its automobiles are able to run on ethanol, and there is an ethanol pump at just about every fuel station. Cane ethanol now accounts for 40% of Brazil’s transportation fuel. And one thing Brazil has figured out that we have not: corn-based ethanol (the type we produce here) is not energy efficient. It takes nearly as much energy to produce corn ethanol as it saves (cane ethanol doesn’t need to make the transformation from carb to sugar) – not to mention the adverse effects that increasing corn prices will have on the world economy.

All this leads me to ask a question, because I have not been able to find an answer. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Can we produce sugar cane here? And, even if we could, would enough people have the guts to stand up to the corn lobby to make anything happen anyway?

Or, are we all just that apathetic?

Now, if you read the comments left on this post there’s already been a lot of enlightening discussion. There are a lot of pros and cons on these issues, but I feel that in general there’s a lack of informed debate going on. On the one hand you have people writing how corn ethanol is a boondoggle. Their arguments are that it’ll raise food prices, it’s not efficient enough, it’s only profitable because of government subsidies, people aren’t factoring in the pollution caused by growing the corn, etc, etc. On the other hand you have the corn lobby telling us that corn-based ethanol is the way of the future with less pollution, will give us energy independence, bring more money back to America, etc, etc.

But when I hear individuals talk about it they usually have either decided to be for it or against it based on no more than a couple of points. What annoys me the most is those who have decided that biofuels are a bust because they’re currently expensive to produce and are not a magic solution that makes everything better in one go. Anyhow, I’ll get back to that later. Let’s address the first point that Radly Balko brought up:

If an “alternative energy” source is so efficient that it needs massive government subsidy to event (sic) exist, much less survive, it’s not a viable long-term source of energy.

No kidding (and, by the way, it’s exactly what’s happening with the corn-based ethanol industry here.)

According to this article published in 2006:

[O]ne major subsidy is the ethanol program, currently with a $0.51 per gallon subsidy, which will in the near future amount to a bill of over $3 billion annually on 6 billion gallons of production.

The last time I was at the gas station near here that has an E85 pump, it was selling for nearly a dollar less than regular unleaded. Take away that subsidy and you still get a price nearly a half-dollar less than the cheapest grade of gas. Not to mention that the price of corn isn’t nearly as volatile as the price of gas. It varies some, but not really week to week or day to day. Does corn ethanol need a subsidy to exist? No, not really. Furthermore, as I pointed out in my post that I linked to, oil is massively subsidized.

There is growing awareness in this country that the full cost of using oil for transportation is “subsidized” — that is, gasoline prices paid by consumers do not reflect the full economic cost to society. The true cost is hidden by myriad direct and indirect public subsidies, which include

• reduced corporate income taxes for the oil industry
• lower than average sales taxes on gasoline
• government funding of programs that primarily benefit the oil industry and motorists
• “hidden” environmental costs caused by motor vehicles, namely air, water, and noise pollution

You can read the full article for yourself, but basically we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And what would we be doing in the Middle East if not for oil? If not for oil, we’d pretty much treat that area of the world like we do Africa. How much has the war in Iraq cost us now? To me, the idea that somehow there’s something more wrong with corn ethanol than with oil simply because there’s a per-gallon subsidy for ethanol whereas oil’s is hidden away is just wrong-headed. The corn subsidy is not an argument against ethanol, despite the fact that I favor getting rid of corn subsidies.

Then some opponents attack the energy efficiency of corn based ethanol and declare it to be energy negative. Someone has already done the job of refuting that for me, so I quote Wikipedia:

Opponents of corn ethanol production in the U.S. often quote the 2005 paper of David Pimentel, a retired Entomologist, and Tadeusz Patzek, a Geological Engineer from Berkeley. Both have been exceptionally critical of ethanol and other biofuels. Their studies contend that ethanol, and biofuels in general, are “energy negative”, meaning they take more energy to produce than is contained in the final product.

A 2006 report by the U.S. Department Agriculture compared the methodologies used by a number of researchers on this subject and found that the majority of research showed that the energy balance for ethanol is positive (’1.24 for corn ethanol). A 2006 study published in Science analyzed six studies, normalizing assumptions for comparison; Pimental and Patzek’s studies still showed a net energy loss, while four others showed a net energy gain. Furthermore, fossil fuels also require significant energy inputs which have seldom been accounted for in the past.

Not that I’m questioning their authority, but how did an entomologist and geologist get into this anyway? So look, most people agree that corn ethanol is energy positive. Not incredibly energy positive to be sure. But it’s viable.

Let me bring the point about corn subsidies back up, because perhaps some people misunderstand what that subsidy does. Corn is America’s #1 crop, both in acreage under cultivation and sales. From the Christian Science Monitor, an interview with Michael Pollan:

And we subsidize this overproduction. We structure the subsidies to make corn very, very cheap, which encourages farmers to plant more and more to make the same amount of money. The argument is that it helps us compete internationally. The great beneficiaries are the processors that are using corn domestically.

Now who would that be, and why?

• Of 10,000 items in a typical grocery store, at least 2,500 use corn in some form during production or processing.

• Your bacon and egg breakfast, glass of milk at lunch, or hamburger for supper were all produced with US corn.

• Besides food for human and livestock consumption, corn is used in paint, paper products, cosmetics, tires, fuel, plastics, textiles, explosives, and wallboard – among other things.

• In the US, corn leads all other crops in value and volume of production – more than double that of any other crop.

• Corn is America’s chief crop export, with total bushels exported exceeding total bushels used domestically for food, seed, and industrial purposes.

In short, the price of corn in the world is determined by America’s corn subsidy, which keeps us overproducing this crop. Which, you may say, is great for people in third world nations that need our food. Hopefully they can get it. But that’s also the reason it makes sense to use corn for ethanol. Corn is plentiful. Corn is grown in truly vast quantities. This is for political reasons that have nothing to do with whether we want or need that much corn. I strongly recommend reading Michael Pollan to understand why we actually need not to produce that much corn. On the one hand, we need to quit making corn artificially bounteous and cheap because the uses we put it to such as cattle feed and hfcs are absolutely terrible. On the other hand, without the subsidy, there simply wouldn’t be as much corn to go around. So you have a choice, get rid of the corn subsidy to discourage corn ethanol production (since the low price of corn is the main reason for ethanol’s profitability, not the ethanol subsidy) and dramatically cut back the amount of corn for world food consumption, or keep the subsidy which will only encourage more profitable uses for the corn than selling it at rock-bottom prices to third-world nations, namely ethanol production. The best argument against corn ethanol is this artificial over-production of corn, but no one wants to face the reality of what ending that over-production would mean.

I’m going to leave that alone for now and move on to the next point. As Michael D. points out in his post:

But look to Brazil – they’re doing just fine with sugar cane ethanol. In fact, Brazil has achieved what has eluded us forever – energy independence. In fact, three-quarters of its automobiles are able to run on ethanol, and there is an ethanol pump at just about every fuel station.

Can we produce sugar cane here? And, even if we could, would enough people have the guts to stand up to the corn lobby to make anything happen anyway?

There are several answers here, all of which lead pretty much to the fact that the US cannot rely on sugarcane as a source of ethanol.

The US does produce sugar. Nowhere near on the scale that Brazil does, but sugarcane only grows in tropical or subtropical environments. Sugar beets produce slightly more than half of US sugar production (excluding hfcs, that is). Unfortunately, sugar beets require four times as much land as sugar cane to produce the same size crop. Sugar beets are also a rotational crop, which means that averaged over a period of years, their production is going to much lower than sugar cane because they have to take some years off. The USDA puts US sugar production at 7,665,000 tons for 2007. Brazil’s is 32,100,000 tons. You can already see that the environment is partially responsible for this huge disparity in production. Brazil can grow that much and probably more. There’s no way the US could hope to match that production. Now to put to rest the idea that sugar prices are depressed in the US, thus discouraging sugarcane and sugar beet growth, the US lays tariffs on all sugar imports to keep prices up. The USDA manages all sugar production and they only allow domestic sugar producers to make so much, and they only let so much come in from the world market. In short, they’re artificially keeping all sugar producers profitable instead of making them compete (so much for laissez faire, eh?).

Basically, even if it there was a substantial profit motive, not enough sugar can be cultivated in the US to meet even a small fraction of ethanol demand. That’s another reason corn is far more prevalent right now. And of course, lastly there’s the USDA study which opines that sugar ethanol is unprofitable at current gas and corn ethanol prices:

Producing ethanol from sugar beets and sugarcane is estimated to be profitable at current ethanol spot prices and at about breakeven over the next several months, excluding capital replacement costs, based on current futures prices for ethanol. Over the longer term, the profitability of producing ethanol from sugarcane and sugar beets depends on the prices of these two crops, the costs of conversion, and the price of gasoline. A moderation in the price of gasoline and a return in ethanol prices to their historic relationship with gasoline prices could push the price of ethanol well below breakeven levels for converting sugar beets and sugarcane into ethanol. However, the market for crude oil remains very volatile and highly sensitive to events in the Middle East, making it very difficult to forecast future trends in crude oil and gasoline prices.

The “now” of the quote is during 2006, when their estimated cost of gas was $4/gallon. Not that that won’t happen again, but that’s their calculated break point for profitability. So until we reach that again, there’s not a lot of incentive for sugar producers to contribute to ethanol.

All well and good, but what if we ended the tariffs and imported sugar for use as corn ethanol? The question there is whether there’s enough world capacity to actually supply us with the quantities of sugar we need to make ethanol in an amount substantial enough to replace gasoline. While there is excess capacity in the world market, it’s really not enough. I read somewhere that if all of America’s corn were devoted to ethanol, it would replace 12% of total gas consumption. Borrowing from wikipedia again, the US had 243,023,485 passenger vehicles registered in 2004. Now quoting the Michael D’s post again, “Cane ethanol now accounts for 40% of Brazil’s transportation fuel.” I can’t seem to find a solid answer for how many cars Brazil has, but given that Brazil’s population is about 183 million, and that the US has the highest per-capita ownership of cars, I’d have to say there can’t possibly be any more than 150 million Brazilian cars. 40% of that would 60 million vehicles. That’s a wild guess but if anything it’s high, so let’s just stick with it. Now Brazil might be able to provide enough sugar to fuel twice that many cars. Or even three times that many. But Brazil has an output of sugar roughly 4.5 times higher than the US. The US doesn’t have the extra capacity to use sugar for fuel at all. Besides that it makes more money for farmers to sell it as sugar. Basically sugar’s a no-go just for economic reasons.

People tend to get dogmatic about their arguments and I try not to fall into that. Corn ethanol is not the best solution. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. Sugar ethanol simply can’t provide much ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is by far the best, but current technologies do not allow mass production or cost-effective production. And because of this there are people who say that biofuel is not the answer. But you know, technologies come along, especially with a little government help (like the railroads, highways, phones, computers, etc). Corn ethanol will never be the perfect solution, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it. Couple any biofuel with hybrid cars and you get a powerful answer to oil. And the more we start to use them, the better they’ll become. We can use corn ethanol as a transitional state to get us started on the path to clean fuels. There’s no real reason not to. Anything is better than the pollution and war that oil brings.

Someday we’ll get to the point where we derive most electricity from sunlight. Someday our cars will run on switchgrass and batteries that we charge at home off of sunlight. But we can’t make that leap in one generation of vehicles. We can’t avoid the problems that transitional technologies will bring. That doesn’t mean there’s a reason not to embrace them whole-heartedly in the meantime, and always be looking down the road at better options. We have to start somewhere, right?

Well, solar power has been a long time coming and many detractors still don’t consider it even a realistic potential source. New technology, however, may make it possible for solar power to replace existing fossil-fuel based energy. Sci-fi authors have been talking about beamed solar power for a long time, but only recently has it become a possibility.

A proposal is being vetted by U.S. military space strategists that 10 percent of the U.S. baseload of energy by 2050, perhaps sooner, could be produced by space based solar power (SBSP). Furthermore, a demonstration of the concept is being eyed to occur within the next five to seven years.

Less sci-fi, but perhaps more practical, are new types of ground-based solar energy collectors, which, with new technologies, are expected to be able to take over enery production for a large part of the US grid.

If those claims stand up, however, solar-thermal plants could provide a significant chunk of the Southwest’s—and potentially the nation’s—electricity. “The maximum you can get into the grid is about 25 percent from solar,” including photovoltaics, Mills says. But “once you have storage, it changes from this niche thing to something that could be the big gorilla on the grid equivalent to coal.”

Furthermore,

Assuming that their storage system works, Mills and his colleagues calculated in a paper presented today at the Solar Energy Society World Congress in Beijing that such solar-thermal power plants could match the electricity needs of both California and Texas. And, by combining a system that would meet the needs of California and Texas, solar-thermal plants could supply 96 percent of the national electricity demand. “The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles,” O’Donnell says. “Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough.”

It’s not sci-fi anymore. The sooner we adopt this technology and cut free from fossil-fuels, the better.

Ah, sweet music to my ears:

The Bush administration’s aggressive drive to promote oil and gas drilling on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains has sparked growing anger here among traditional Republican constituents who say that the stepped-up push for energy development is sullying some of the country’s most majestic landscape.

The emerging backlash from ranchers and sportsmen, which is occurring despite an economic boom driven by drilling, is threatening GOP primacy in at least one corner of what has been a solidly Republican West. Long the most reliably conservative expanse of a state that has gone red in six of the past seven presidential contests, Colorado’s western third shows evidence of the “purpling” that has made Colorado look increasingly like a swing state.

Support from the western slope was seen as pivotal in the elections of Democrats Bill Ritter as governor last year and Sen. Ken Salazar in 2004, the same year Salazar’s older brother, Rep. John Salazar, was elected to Congress from a western Colorado district that had given 66 percent of its vote to the Republican candidate four years earlier. All three Democrats found support in GOP enclaves while calling for “balance” in energy extraction.

“I can only speak for myself and I’m a registered Republican, but last year I voted a straight Democratic ticket. First time in my life,” said Bob Elderkin, 68, who heads the town of Rifle’s chapter of the Colorado Mule Deer Association, a hunting group that has made common cause with environmentalists against drilling. “The Republicans have kind of lost touch with reality.”

As the administration is learning, all the industrial money in the world won’t get you elected when you turn off your own supporters, and the quickest way to do it is to let energy companies foul the air, water and soil where they live.

Apparently Texas has the largest number of wind farms in the country (via Yglesias.) Who knew? I’m not sure Texas law schools will stop teaching oil and gas law and switch to “wind” law, but this is something that our state deserves to be proud of.

Shyah, right. A study by the libertarian Reason Foundation tells us:

Comparing this data, the study concludes that overall hybrids cost more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. But even more surprising, smaller hybrids’ energy costs are greater than many large, non-hybrid SUVs.

For instance, the dust-to-dust energy cost of the bunny-sized Honda Civic hybrid is $3.238 per mile. This is quite a bit more than the $1.949 per mile that the elephantine Hummer costs. The energy cots of SUVs such as the Tahoe, Escalade, and Navigator are similarly far less than the Civic hybrid.

According to them, they did a thorough study of all the costs associated with building, maintaining, and disposing of automobiles, as well as the network that produces and delivers fuel. Their numbers aren’t transparent by any stretch of the imagination, but even if they were, the obvious flaw is that the cost of gasoline itself isn’t factored into the cost of the vehicle, nor are the environmental costs of cleaning up after oil refineries, much less spills.

Basically, this “study” is simply meant to blindside average people with numbers and prove the libertarian point that government intervention to promote hybrids is unwarranted. They took a methodology of only examining costs inherent to a vehicle, which, since naturally the external energy cost of a fuel-efficient vehicle is much lower than an SUV tends to show that hybrid vehicles, the most efficient, cost the most in a highly refined “cost per mile” figure.

Hybrids may not be the best thing since spreadable butter, but really, you have to be living in unicorn-land to claim that a Hummer costs less environmentally than a Prius.

The House voted 355-69 on Thursday to adopt a proposal, as part of a $34.2 billion bill that funds State Department operations and foreign aid, to revive the Iraq Study Group.

The House also voted 223-201 to reverse a ban on contraception aid to groups overseas that offer abortions in an effort to overturn Bush’s ban via executive order. Bush will veto the measure and conservatives in the House will uphold it.

Lawmakers from both parties proposed opening up agriculture exports to Cuba and ending travel restrictions, putting them at odds with a White House adamantly opposed to easing a half-century-old embargo.

On the Senate side, progress on the energy bill was a mixed bag. The Senate voted to increase fuel economy standards to 35 miles per gallon for cars and SUVs, the first significant boost demanded of automakers in nearly 20 years. The agreement was announced at a news conference and then quickly adopted by the Senate without a roll call vote. However, the chamber refused to limit debate on a $32.1 billion tax package proposed by the Finance Committee that would roll back tax cuts for oil and gas companies in favor of renewable energy sources, like the bill the House passed earlier in the year. However, there is still hope for the bill to come back and be passed. Democrats got enough Republican support they were only three votes down from the 60 votes needed. Sen. Boxer was out of town, and Sen. Reid only voted against it as a procedural move so he can bring it back up later when potentially Sen. Johnson will be back in the Senate after having recovered from his stroke earlier in the year. Thus, they would have the three votes needed for passage.

The Senate Judiciary Committee continued to ramp up its pressure on the White House by authorizing Chairman Patrick Leahy to subpoena documents relating to the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Republican Sens. Hatch, Grassley, and ranking member Specter joined all Democrats on the panel in subpoenaing both the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice for documents relating to the authorization of and legal justification for the wiretapping program.

UPDATE:

According to the AP, the Senate passed an energy bill late Thursday that includes an increase in automobile fuel economy, new laws against energy price-gouging and a requirement for huge increases in the production of ethanol.

“Shortly before midnight, senators voted 62-32 to cut off debate, and followed by passing the bill 65-27. The measure now awaits action by the House, which is expected to take it up next week. But attempts to combine the two bills and send legislation to President Bush probably won’t be possible until later this year.”

UPDATE II:

On Friday, the House voted to prohibit any aid to Saudi Arabia as lawmakers “accused the close ally of religious intolerance and bankrolling terrorist organizations,” according to the AP. The prohibition was attached to a foreign aid funding bill for next year that has not yet been debated by the Senate. It also faces a veto threat from the White House.

Many of the people in opposition to corn-based ethanol do make good points. But it is not a good point that corn-based ethanol makes grain for cattle too expensive. Feeding cattle corn often requires that the animals be drugged! Nor is the “but ethanol is only profitable because of government subsidies” argument worth very much. Yes, it’s not as profitable as gasoline is yet, but it’s kind of funny that nobody mentions that oil receives more in subsidies (by not being taxed) than ethanol does.

There are two criticisms that are very valid though. One of thme is that while we subsidize ethanol we don’t subsidize other forms of renewable energy. Solar power is slowly but surely growing into its own, and if this South African technology is real, we’re already at the point to replace coal power plants with photovoltaic cells on all our houses. It’s something we should definitely be funding.

The other real criticism is that a corn ethanol is also a means to get a big chunk of change poured into midwest states that primarily produce corn. No doubt some politicians are already lining their pockets with money from the ethanol industry or federal earmarks. I’m not one who thinks that we need to allow some irrationality and corruption as long as it’s for the greater good. No, we need to make sure it’s not happening. End the tariffs on sugarcane ethanol produced in Brazil and we have a good start. We need to embrace the most environmentally friendly and fiscally responsible green energy we can. That means no stacking the deck.

I don’t know if “cellulosic” ethanol is really feasible or if it’s a pipe dream, but I’m hoping it’s a realistic goal. If so, then the corn ethanol debate will fade away naturally while we switch over to other forms of ethanol. I just hope people like the rancher mentioned in the article don’t put their own agenda ahead of what’s best for all of America.