Science vs. Corn Flakes
Today’s Catch-22 award goes to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), author of a bill that simultaneously eliminates the need for states to add ethanol to gasoline while forcing California to buy much more ethanol than presently to add to its gasoline.
A 1990 congressional mandate required that all gasoline contain 2% of an oxygenate to fight smog. There were two acceptable oxygenates--ethanol, made primarily from Midwestern corn, and the petrochemical methyl tertiary butyl ether, better known as MTBE.
California refiners opted to use this latter substance. It mixed easily with gasoline and was more readily available than ethanol. Then MTBE began showing up in water wells and other places it didn’t belong, including Lake Tahoe. It turns out that the substance is a stubborn and potent pollutant and a suspected carcinogen that leaks from underground storage tanks and moves quickly into water supplies. In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis ordered a ban on MTBE use beginning at the end of this year (although he is now considering another year’s delay).
California already uses about 100 million gallons of ethanol each winter to reduce carbon monoxide in the air and may need more ethanol to boost the octane of the next generation of reformulated gasolines. But Midwest farmers want Congress to artificially create a much bigger California market for them.
When the concern over MTBE first arose, oil refiners and environmental groups alike agreed that the state’s new reformulated gasolines could meet clean air standards without either MTBE or ethanol. By repealing the 1990 mandate and banning the use of MTBE after 2006, Daschle’s bill, S 1766, also acknowledges that oxygenates aren’t needed to fight smog. But it nonetheless would require California to use 500 million gallons of ethanol.
Why, a political naif might ask, would Washington bully California into using ethanol when it’s not necessary? The growers now claim that ethanol has to be used in massive quantities not as an oxygenate but as a source of renewable energy to lessen our reliance on oil imports. That’s a slender excuse. This really is a blatant subsidy for Midwestern corn farmers and the ethanol processors such as the giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., the big-bucks political contributor.
Daschle and his Midwestern colleagues have the clout to push the ethanol mandate through Congress and to win the president’s signature. Their goal is to boost ethanol output over the next decade from 1.7 billion to 5 billion gallons a year nationally. The compulsory sale of an unneeded product is bad public policy, and someone ought to strike it from Daschle’s legislation, leaving science and the market to decide when ethanol is needed and in what quantities.
But such common sense isn’t politically feasible, so Davis and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are negotiating with Daschle for a three-year delay in implementing the ethanol edict in California. Without it, experts say the state can suffer gasoline shortages of 5% to 10% and price spikes, a recipe for another energy crisis. All for a particularly absurd agribusiness subsidy.
