Food in Your Tank

The idea of putting perfectly good food, cereal grains, into your gas tank just got a longer lease on life thanks to the US Senate and our own Senators Bingaman and Udall.  They voted to keep the $5 billon subsidy to the farming community to turn grain into ethanol.  These farmers by the way are the same crowd that want no tax increases and urge their delegations to gut Medicare and Social Security.  Oh, they are also the ones who were brought into the modern era by Roosevelt's Rural Electrification programs.  And don't forget the other subsidies they get for other things they do or don't do.  Of course these days most farmers are large corporate conglomerates.

Politics is full of double standards.  There is no getting around it.  But this particular policy of causing food prices to rise because of the production of ethanol is just plain stupid.  And that ethanol doesn't make any real difference in our domestic fuel supplies.  Saying it does is like the mantra of the "drill baby drill" crowd at the oil and gas corporate offices.

Factoid.....The lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the target of the drill mantra, currently produces oil supplies equaling five days consumption per year in the U.S.   So, even if you doubled up on drilling it would make little difference, except for the destruction of aquifers and watersheds.  Who needs those anyway?