Al Gore Goofs on Ethanol Subsidies and Surprisingly Admits So

“Al Gore’s Important Admission” by Andrew Cline  at the American Spectator:

“It may not seem like much, but Al Gore’s recent admission that ethanol subsidies are bad policy is a really big deal. 

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol,” Reuters reported Gore saying during a green energy summit in Athens. “First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.”

This is hardly likely to change U.S. energy policy overnight. As Gore said, “It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.” Though that is one more reason to oppose such programs, it is almost beside the point. Gore’s admission has much more important implications, namely the revelation of two important truths: 1. Policies to prop up ethanol are environmental frauds; and 2. So is Al Gore.

Al Gore’s doomsaying has turned him into the world’s famous environmental prophet. He is the sage in the green robe. His words are truth — undisputable and indispensable. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

“Knowledge,” they wrote. And “needed” measures to counteract the change. Until this week, one of those needed measures, according to Gore, was to turn corn into fuel.

“I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress — at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it,” Gore said during a Dec. 1, 1998, speech to a Farm Journal conference. “The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be.”

The first part of that statement is true. The second is not.

On Aug. 4, 1994, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save the EPA’s ethanol mandate. The fight was between farm state politicians, who wanted to mandate ethanol use, and others who thought methanol would work just as well. Gore broke the tie in favor of the farm state lobby. Though he claimed it was for the planet, Gore’s support of ethanol really was to buy the votes of farmers. He admitted as much in Athens:

One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.

Al Gore? Put politics before the planet? Pshaw.

But it is true; he has admitted it.

This is important because Gore’s ethanol exploits duplicate the entire global climate change debate in miniature form.

To gain votes, Gore pushed an idea that was widely thought to be environmentally beneficial, but which skeptics claimed was actually the opposite. The Heritage Foundation at least as far back as the early 1980s was warning that ethanol subsidies were bad energy policy. By the mid-1990s, the mandate was being attacked as a sop to the corn lobby that had no environmental benefits. And by the late 2000s, the broadly accepted view had changed entirely. Scientists had come to believe that grain-based biofuels like ethanol were driving up food prices, causing food shortages, and possibly making global warming worse.

Al Gore, though, boasted that ethanol was helping save the planet. From Gore there was no doubt, no uncertainty, no scientific argument. It was his way, the green way, or the path to planetary destruction. There were no other options.

But there were, and the people offering them — not Al Gore — were right. And that leads to the obvious question: If the Enviro-Oracle got ethanol wrong, then what else might he have gotten wrong?

The point is not that Gore is entirely wrong. It’s that he is wrong enough (remember the errors in An Inconvenient Truth) to merit skepticism. But law doesn’t take skeptics’ views into account. Environmental regulations compel compliance. Only in the market does the skepticism of the minority become an important player. If Al Gore bases his personal financial investments on faulty science, it matters to no one but Al Gore, and perhaps his wife. But if states base environmental regulations on faulty science he pushed, we are all harmed.

The great ethanol error would’ve been corrected quickly had the market been left in control. It was only the misguided hand of government that grew this problem to global proportions, and perpetuates it still.

This fall the EPA approved a waiver allowing gasoline to contain up to 15 percent ethanol for cars made since 2007. Congress has mandated that 13.95 billion gallons of renewable fuels (mostly ethanol) be produced in 2011, up from 12.95 billion gallons this year. (Can you imagine how much worse it would be had Gore been president?)

The bottom line is this: If we cannot base our environmental policies on the pronouncements of Al Gore, should we really be passing costly, far-reaching mandates that force people to behave as Al Gore would want them to? Wouldn’t it be better to let the market decide, and leave Al Gore to investing heavily in biofuel companies?

Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.”

Comment:   Our Earth will not come to an end because of global warming.   Nor because of a  tiny  rise in CO2 levels.     Lefties already concede that, but they don’t want people to know they have conceded anything.      They cleverly changed the title of disaster to “Climate Change.” 

If scientists and Lefties were really concerned about peoople’s lives and welfare connected with climate-change, they would plot warming up the Earth’s temperature a degree or two, making Minnesota horticultural zone 5.

NPR, Another Leftwing Crowd Funded by Tax Payers, Should Be Sent to Drift on Its Own

Bruce Walker of the Boston Herald wrote the following article, “Time for NPR to cut the Tax payer Cord.”

“We live in times when those who report the news have become the news.

Keith Olbermann and Juan Williams garnered national sympathy (or glee, for some) for their respective timeout (MSNBC) and firing (NPR). Now comes National Review with a report that National Public Radio has stacked the deck of its board of directors with – gasp! – liberals.

As a daily NPR listener who can even perform reasonably good impersonations of Corey Flintoff and Garrison Keillor, I don’t find that revelation surprising. Nor do I find it terribly dismaying. The time for the rending and tearing of garments because media outlets display favoritism of one worldview over another passed long ago. The horse has been out of the stable for decades, so we might as well continue to allow it free rein without feigning outrage.  We get it.  Fox leans right, and most other outlets tilt left.

What should give us pause, however, is that whereas Fox and most of the other fillies in the media stable are private enterprises, NPR is anything but. Its budget consists of government subsidies and tax-deductible donations from corporations and individuals. Liberal fat cat George Soros recently bequeathed $1.8 million of his personal fortune to NPR for the hiring of state-based reporters.

One can imagine the immense tax advantages of such a donation, not to mention the millions of dollars of tax write-offs enjoyed by

write-offs enjoyed by corporations, businesses, and the thousands of NPR listeners just like you.

Likewise, it takes little imagination to suss out Soros’s main reason for generously supporting public radio. Much like Rupert Murdoch with Fox News, Soros is providing a bankroll for reporting biased toward his own political and social agenda.

The main difference, however, between Fox and its sister networks on one hand and NPR on the other is that the latter receives government subsidies. Taxpayer dollars, blended with Soros’s largesse and tax-deductible corporate monies and stirred by the 55 avowed liberals seated on the NPR board of directors – that’s a mighty potent cocktail.

Granted the funds NPR receives from the government are minuscule in comparison with other boondoggles, but the fact that our government subsidizes direct competition with other media outlets cannot be ignored. The loss of listeners and viewers

listeners and viewers suffered by privately owned media outlets with which NPR competes must factor into the costs incurred by public broadcasting.

The dismissal of Williams this past October once again raised calls for cutting government subsidies for the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting enterprise. Cut these enterprises free from the government dole, many say, and allow them the privilege of reporting from whatever perspective their ideology dictates.

That’s the right call. NPR and other public broadcasting outlets should be allowed to succeed or fail based on their merits in the market place, not propped up by tax payer dollars.”

Islamists to Soak U.S. Taxpayers to Build at World Trade Center Site!

All Americans and not just New York Leftists should know that the Islamists who wanted to leave their victory scent at the World Trade Center site by building their Victory Mosque, are now asking for U.S. tax payer dollars to fund their pretenses at the site.  

Will Mayor Michael Bloomberg continue to maintain his Quisling leadership supporting these Islamist plotters and their extremism?   Let’s find out what these Islamist peace-loving folks are doing in the United Kingdom with the properties they have absorbed to spread their views of life.   Perhaps we can discover the LOVE Mr. Bloomberg and his associates have for this world wide movement which seems to escape  ordinary American understanding.

“John Burns should be a name etched in the alert American mind with all things ideal.  His reporting during the darkest days of terrorized, war-torn  Iraq was exemplary, courageous, critical, reliable, informative, and accurate as best the  human brain can manage.  He writes the following article published in the New York Times:

“LONDON — A British network of more than 40 part-time Islamic schools and clubs with 5,000 students has been teaching from a Saudi Arabian government curriculum that contains anti-Semitic and homophobic views, including a textbook that asks children to list the “reprehensible” qualities of Jews, according to a BBC documentary broadcast on Monday.

The 30-minute “Panorama” program quoted the Saudi government-supplied textbook as saying that Jews “looked like monkeys and pigs,” and that Zionists set out to achieve “world domination.” The program quoted a separate part of the curriculum — for children as young as 6 — saying that someone who is not a believer in Islam at death would be condemned to “hellfire.”

The program said the textbooks had been obtained by an “undercover” Saudi Arabian researcher who asked for them during a visit to one of the Saudi-backed schools and clubs, which meet in the evenings and on weekends in a network that is linked to the cultural bureau of the Saudi Embassy in London.

On Monday, the embassy did not respond to requests for comment, but Saudi officials quoted by the BBC disavowed direct responsibility for the schools and clubs and described the teachings cited in the program as having been “taken out of their historical context.”

One of the textbooks, according to the BBC program, prescribed execution as the penalty for gay sex, and outlined differing viewpoints as to whether death should be by stoning, immolation by fire or throwing offenders off a cliff. Another set out the punishments prescribed by Shariah law for theft, including amputation of hands and feet. A BBC video accompanying an article on the program’s Web site showed a textbook illustration of a hand and a foot marked to show where amputations should be made.

Michael Gove, the education minister in the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, said on the program that the government would not tolerate “anti-Semitic material of any kind in English schools.” He elaborated in interviews with British newspapers, saying there was also no place in British schools for teachings against gay men and lesbians. But Mr. Gove appeared to be at pains not to allow the issue to develop into a confrontation with Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country,” he said in a statement issued as the program was broadcast. “We have no desire or wish to intervene in the decisions that the Saudi government makes in its own education system. But we are clear that we cannot have any anti-Semitic material of any kind being used in English schools.”

Mr. Gove added that Ofsted, the government-appointed agency with oversight of education and children’s services, would be “reporting to us shortly” on measures to tighten oversight of part-time schools, whose teaching is currently free of the controls imposed on full-time schools.

“Panorama,” which first appeared on the BBC nearly 60 years ago, is described by the corporation as the world’s longest-running current affairs documentary program. Other “Panorama” investigative programs in recent years have focused on the Vatican’s restrictive rules for dealing with accusations of child molestation by priests, the Pentagon’s inability to account for billions of dollars spent in Iraq, and a pattern of alleged bribes and kickbacks among coaches and scouts in English professional soccer.

Neal Robinson, a theology professor at Leeds University who has written widely about the Koran and Islamic teachings, said in the BBC program that the material cited from the textbooks was taken from ancient texts, and added: “To present it cold, as it is here, as part of the teaching of Islam, is not wise. In the wrong hands, yes, I think it is ammunition for anti-Semitism.” “

Comment:  Now return across the sea from London to the chaos and duplicitous and  suicidal  procedings at the site of the  greatest atrocity on American soil in history.  

Foreigners related to those who plotted and carried out the attack have arrived at the site with gifts of gold.    We have a president called Barack Hussein Obama who backs this  Islamist invasion at this American Wound Knee.   We have that city’s Mayor playing Quisling pretending he has no clue of anything dark in these Islamist aggressors’ plans.

These Islamists are  so Americanized  they are doing the Obama thing……expecting to use American tax payers’ dollars to fund the landing on Islamofascism on Manhattan Island.   And the American tax payer is expected to be obliged to build an enemy settlement  where 2,700 Americans were murdered in 2001, and build this antiAmerican with their own money and the blessings of the American president, Barack Hussein Obama!

Good night America….Sweet dreams in your battles against Islamofascism!

Are there any Americans left in the Obama government and leaders in the state of New York who are not 21st century Quislings collaborating with the enemy?