Obama Clueless on Corn

By Chip Hanlon | June 24, 2008 | 9:56 AM | 2 Comments

Sharing a common sense paragraph from our friend, Vince Farrell of Scotsman Capital, from his note to clients this morning:

Lastly, there are signs the government may allow farmers to plant more corn on millions of acres of conservation land. The Agriculture Department has the authority to release farmers from contracts under which they agreed to set aside tracts of land as natural habitat. Also, the Environmental Protection Agency can roll back requirements for ethanol production. A quarter of the US corn crop is used for biofuels rather than animal or human food. Both ideas make a lot of sense to me. Now if we could only find some leadership...

Ah, yes, leadership... well, here's one person it won't come from: Obama Camp Closely Linked with Ethanol

Couple that with the fact that Obama is the candidate supported most heavily by PACs and lobbyists, despite his gross misrepresentations to the same about John McCain, and one can see that common sense and Barack Obama won't come within shouting distance of one another on the topic of ethanol.

Sensible-thinking people realize that diverting so much of our corn crop to a net energy loser (David Pimentel has shown for years that ethanol produces less energy than is required to make it) with gas above $4/gallon is absurd, but the presumptive Democratic nominee has no chance of figuring this one out.

Obama's all wet on this one. McCain should not only keep on topic about offshore drilling (maybe he'll even figure out ANWR along the way), he should take up the cause for Newt's "Drill Now" initiative.  Advantage McCain on this one-- big time.

http://globalcapital.blogspot http://globalcapital.blogspot.com Another home run, Chip! I'm neither a McCain nor Obama supporter. As a traditional conservative, I won't vote for either this fall. But I must say that on this issue, McCain has been consistent. He has always wisely opposed the subsidies and ethanol mandates. It's one reason he gave Iowa a "pass" last January during the caucuses. He knew that his opposition to the farm subsidies wouldn't win him any votes there. Sure enough. It didn't! Submitted by sbenard on Fri, 2008/06/27 - 10:03pm » reply |

“Mr. McCain advocates “Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce” (Rohter, 6/23/08). I agree that the ethanol mandate combined with the tariff is incredibly dimwitted. Unfortunately, the general public seems so uninformed on the issue that they don't even realize what's going on. So this would be one HUGE point for McCain... if people stopped, open their eyes, and did a little research instead accepting what policy makers say as fact without actually checking it out for themselves. Submitted by lharrington on Tue, 2008/06/24 - 1:04pm » reply |