Al Gore's admission--more gas from a windbag

Remember Al Gore, leader of the movement to save our planet? Sure, there were inconsistencies and flat-out lies in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and sure, he stands to make a lot of money off his advisory role in destroying the economies of the industrialized world. But it’s worth it because he always knows exactly what we should do, right? Oops . . . poor Al has changed his tune when it comes to ethanol.

Just this week he spoke to clean energy financiers in Greece and admitted ethanol is not a cure to our energy problems. "It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol," he said. The benefits of ethanol are "trivial," he added, but "It's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going." He’s actually on to something here. Ethanol has become a purely political machine: It serves no purpose other than re-electing incumbents and transferring wealth to farm states and ethanol producers

I love the reference to the “lobbies that keep it going,” considering this includes Gore himself. Over the years, he pushed hard for ethanol. The Wall Street Journal had an article that followed the attempts over time to lobby for ethanol. It first came into being amid the 1970s energy crisis, with Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress subsidizing anything that claimed to be a substitute for foreign oil. Mr. Gore, in the freshman House class of 1976, was an early proponent of what was then called "gasahol."

The subsidies continued through the 1990s, with the ethanol lobby finding a sympathetic ear in Clinton EPA chief and Gore protege Carol Browner, who in 1994 banned the gasoline additive MTBE and left ethanol as the only option under clean air laws. When the Senate split 50-50 on repealing this de facto mandate, then Vice President Gore cast the deciding vote for . . . ethanol. That served him well in the 2000 Democratic primaries against ethanol critic Bill Bradley.

During the George W. Bush years, Big Ethanol adapted again, attaching itself to the global warming panic that Mr. Gore did as much as anyone to foment. Republicans in Congress formalized the mandate and increased subsidies in the 2005 and 2007 energy bills. Are you seeing a pattern here? It’s Gore, always at the front of this drive to subsidize ethanol. Remember, this is the same Al Gore we are all supposed to look to for truth about global warming and its solution.

So what happened to Gore’s dream? Fellow greens have slowly turned against corn ethanol, thanks to the growing scientific evidence that biofuels increase carbon emissions more than fossil fuels do. But the boondoggle lives on in dreams for so-called advanced fuels like cellulosic ethanol. Note Mr. Gore's objection only to "first generation," though the Wall Street Journal said people have been told for two decades that advanced ethanol is just a year or two away from viability.

Here’s the good news. At least on corn subsidies, there is a growing left-right anti-boondoggle coalition. The Journal article noted that major corn energy subsidies such as the 54-cent-per-gallon blenders credit expire at the end of the year, and Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are encouraging the new Congress to prove its fiscal restraints by letting them die.

I think this whole affair says a lot about Al Gore. Do we trust him to take our economy in his hands? Do we believe his alarmist rantings? I hope not.