The food riots that are circumnavigating the globe could become almost
as death-dealing as your Nincompoop-In-Chief's two FAILED wars.

But we don't hear a peep from your White House war criminal that his
failed plot to "cure America's addiction to oil" should be revised way
downward -- or better -- discontinued and replaced by workable
solutions.

No, the worst "president" in U.S. history doesn't admit mistakes.  And
there's good reason.  He'd spend most of his time admitting his
mistakes!

Mr. Sloan reminds us that there WERE other alternatives, roads not
taken.

-----------------------------------
"The Ethanol Cure's Side Effects"

By Allan Sloan
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; D01

Now that milk and gasoline can each cost $3.50 a gallon, filling up
your grocery cart or sport-utility vehicle has become an exercise in
pain. Most people just wince, pay and get along as best they can. But
someone like me can't help but see these price spikes as a nasty side
effect of America's ethanol program. How nasty? Think of the recent
film starring Will Smith, "I Am Legend."

You might ask what the connection is between a half-baked energy
policy and overdone sci-fi. Answer: the unanticipated consequences of
supposed miracle cures.

Ethanol first. This corn-into-fuel program has been around for years
but gained vast new impetus from President Bush's program to cure
America's "addiction to oil" by using biofuels. We'll grow our way to
self-sufficiency. Oh, well. Not only are oil prices at all-time highs
(in dollar terms), but diverting agricultural land to energy
production -- about a fourth of the U.S. corn crop is dedicated to
ethanol -- is a major factor in the rise of worldwide food prices.
We've had food riots in Mexico, Egypt, Haiti and about a dozen other
countries. There may be worse to come.

Now to sci-fi: If you've seen any of the three versions of "I Am
Legend," you know that its premise is that a cancer vaccine -- your
classic miracle cure -- backfires by starting a plague that wipes out
most of the human race and turns almost all the survivors into
zombies.

Sure, I'm being a bit over the top here, but the parallel to the
ethanol situation is obvious: If something seems too good to be true,
it probably is.

Had the Bush administration and Congress exhibited the wisdom and
courage to slap a big honking gasoline tax on drivers after 9/11 -- or
even in 2006, when the president made his "addiction to oil" speech --
it would have been a better energy policy than the cornographic
panacea they've given us. We could have reduced consumption, cut oil
imports, kept low-income drivers whole by rebating their gas taxes
with income tax breaks, and used the rest of the proceeds for deficit
reduction or something else useful. Food would be cheaper. So would
fuel, because demand would be lower and we'd probably have fewer
financial speculators, who some experts think are responsible for $25
worth of oil's march from $64 a barrel last spring to nearly $120.

So in avoiding a gas tax, we have not avoided higher prices. We've
also done something that should horrify anyone who cares about this
country: transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of our wealth to
oil-producing countries, many of which don't exactly share our
society's values of tolerance and freedom. (Can you spell Russia?
Saudi Arabia?)

Even with gas at $3.50 a gallon, I'd be more than willing to pay a
much higher gas tax than I do now because it would knock down demand,
cost less in the long run and demonstrate that the United States is
willing to do painful things in the present to ensure our future
prosperity. Turning biological waste like wood chips into fuel makes a
lot of sense. But devoting vast acreage of America's breadbasket to
fuel is a really terrible idea, as we're now seeing. Supposedly
miraculous and painless cures have a nasty tendency to backfire. Both
in scary movies and in the even scarier real world.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR200...