CBO: Ethanol production hiked food prices

Does this surprise anyone? 

We are being taken for fools! 

Using human food for energy for vehicles is insane!

Jim Snyder
Increased use of ethanol was responsible for about 10 to 15 percent of the rise in food prices from 2007 to 2008, but reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector by less than 1 percent, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released this week. Proponents of ethanol production have argued that greater ethanol usage would reduce dependence on foreign oil, support rural economies and lower greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline. But the new CBO report could give critics of corn-based ethanol more ammunition to argue that wider production raises food prices — which in turn increases the money the government spends on childhood nutrition programs — and provides little environmental benefit. “This study is yet another in a long list of studies confirming the limitations of corn ethanol as a solution to either fossil fuels use or greenhouse gas emissions goals,” said Craig Cox, Midwest vice president for the Environmental Working Group. “There is clearly an impact on food prices. It has just been a question of how much.”“The results speak for themselves and they add to the continually mounting evidence that there is an impact of ethanol on food prices,” said Scott Openshaw, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which has led a campaign against wider corn-based ethanol production. Ethanol supporters, however, focused on other factors that contributed even more to the run-up in food prices, such as rising energy costs. The CBO report shows that “ethanol’s role in food price increase is minimal,” the Renewable Fuels Association said. “The impact on food prices of our nation’s push to find renewable alternatives to imported oil is dwarfed by the widespread negative economic impacts of oil itself,” said Bob Dineen, RFA president, in a statement. RFA spokesman Matt Hartwig said the CBO study represented a “snapshot” in time and didn’t explain why food prices remained high after corn prices fell back. But Cox said the CBO report confirmed that corn ethanol is a “dead end,” and that Congress should reconsider its biofuels policies. As the CBO report notes, the federal government has supported ethanol production since the late 1970s, through subsidies, tariff protections and production mandates. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 called for the production of 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. Of that total, not more than 15 billion gallons can come from corn-based ethanol. In 2008, oil refiners blended a record 9 billion gallons ethanol from nearly 3 billion bushels of corn, a billion bushels more than were used for the purpose the previous year. The ethanol displaced around 6 billion gallons of gasoline. It isn’t a one-to-one ratio because gasoline has a higher energy content than ethanol.

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