Seven To Ten

The price of milk and gasoline is so high now, filling up the grocery carts and SUV is really frustrating. Most people just wince, pay, and get along as best they can. But has it anything to do with ethanol?

This corn-into-fuel program has been around for years but gained vast new impetus from President Bush’s program to cure America’s “addiction to oil” by using biofuels. We’ll grow our way to self-sufficiency. Not only are oil prices at all-time highs but diverting agricultural land to energy production is a major factor in the rise of worldwide food prices. We’ve had food riots in Mexico and Egypt.

Had the Bush administration and Congress exhibited the wisdom and courage to slap a big honking gasoline tax on drivers after 9/11 - or even in 2006, when the President made his “addiction to oil” speech - it would have been a better energy policy than the corns.

We could have reduced consumption, cut oil imports, supported low-income drivers with income tax breaks, and used the rest of the proceeds for deficit reduction or something else useful. Food would be cheaper. So would fuel, because demand would be lower and we’d probably have fewer financial speculators.

So in avoiding a gas tax, higher prices persist and hundreds of billions of dollars are transferred to oil-producing countries. America need to demonstrate that it is willing to do painful things in the present to ensure future prosperity.

Turning biological waste like wood chips into fuel makes a lot of sense. But devoting vast acreage of America’s breadbasket to fuel - about a third of the U.S. corn crop is dedicated to ethanol - is a really terrible idea, as we’re now seeing.