Biden has been reeling from one disaster to the next since he took office.
We reported on the historic level of inflation, which is being partially driven by escalating gas prices that are the consequence of Biden’s policies. In a move to try and stem the increases from impacting the summer travel season, the White House announced plans to suspend a federal rule and expand the use of a type of ethanol-blended gasoline.
The announcement comes as Biden tries to solve a major pocketbook issue for Americans ahead of the midterm elections in November. According to AAA on Tuesday, the national average cost of gasoline is $4.10 per gallon.Biden said the Environmental Protection Agency will allow E15, which uses ethanol, to be sold this summer. A federal ban prevents E15 from being sold from June 1 through Sept. 15 because of air pollution and smog concerns during the summer months.”E15 is about 10 cents per gallon cheaper than E10,” Biden said during his announcement from Meno, Iowa. “Some gas stations offer an even bigger discount than that.
Biden’s tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve isn’t paying off quite as planned. In fact, it may make oil prices more volatile.
The decision to sell oil from the SPR, instead of working out a loan, also known as an exchange, marked a tradeoff: oil would be released to the market more quickly to lower prices, but it could take longer to replenish the stockpile to its current level, raising longer-term market risks. Some analysts warned it could make oil prices more volatile.Loans of U.S. oil from the SPR guarantee a return of oil over a set period but can take up to months to finalize as the government lines up buyers and negotiates contracts.
As a bonus, it turns out that corn-based ethanol is a greater emitter of carbon dioxide than gasoline.
Oil refiners are required to blend some ethanol into gasoline under a pair of laws, passed in 2005 and 2007, intended to reduce the use of oil and the creation of greenhouse gases by mandating increased levels of ethanol in the nation’s fuel mix every year. However, since passage of the 2007 law, the mandate has been met with criticism that it has contributed to increased fuel prices and has done little to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.A study last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that corn-based ethanol was at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than gasoline when emissions from land-use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion, were included.“Corn ethanol is a greater emitter of greenhouse gases than gasoline,” said Jason Hill, a professor of bioproducts and biosystems engineering at the University of Minnesota.“This will actually work in the opposite direction of the administration’s climate goals rather than being a benefit,” Mr. Mills said.
Not to say that more carbon dioxide, a life-essential gas, is bad. However, the hypocrisy reeks…especially as it this the green-justice oriented bureaucrats at the EPA who approved this plan.
The US and China are the largest corn producers. On average, in the U.S., about 45 percent of corn is used for animal feed, 44 percent is turned into ethanol, and 10 percent is used as food (with about 33% of the food corn is converted into high-fructose corn syrup). Therefore, one has to wonder about the potential impact of this decision on the looming global food crisis.
The U.N. food chief warned Tuesday the war in Ukraine has created “a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe” and will have a global impact “beyond anything we’ve seen since World War II” because many of the Ukrainian farmers who produce a significant amount of the world’s wheat are now fighting Russians.David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, told the U.N. Security Council that already high food prices are skyrocketing.His agency was feeding 125 million people around the world before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, and Beasley said it has had to start cutting their rations because of rising food, fuel and shipping costs. He pointed to war-torn Yemen where 8 million people just had their food allotment cut 50%, “and now we’re looking at going to zero rations.”
Biden’s policy choices have led to a cascade of unintended consequences. Clearly, this one is likely to be no different.
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