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Rolling Stone takes off after ethanol.
The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn’t that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after “solutions” that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America’s future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to f–k off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, “Everything about ethanol is good, good, good.”
This is not just hype — it’s dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. …
… Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 — that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That’s a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 – making it practically worthless as an energy source. “Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas,” says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog. …
Senator Dianne Feinstein did a fine thing last week. Manchester Guardian with details.
California’s Senator Dianne Feinstein on Thursday committed an act of decency that offers at least a slim hope that Congress might become slightly more functional in the autumn than it has been up until now. The United States desperately needs such functionality.
What Feinstein did was to step away from her Democratic colleagues on the Senate judiciary committee by voting in favor of Mississippi appeals court judge, Leslie Southwick for a spot on the US fifth circuit court of appeals. By sending the eminently qualified Southwick to the floor by a one-vote margin (all committee Republicans voted yes and all other committee Democrats voted no), Feinstein did more than just advance the cause of a single nominee. She also re-established the precedent that senators can put merit and evidence over partisanship. …
Bill Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard on the defeatists week of defeat.
… The New York Times was so shocked to discover in late July that public opinion hadn’t continued to move against the war that it redid a poll. The answer didn’t change.
This last incident, though minor, is revealing. On July 24 the Times reported that a new survey had found an increase in the number of Americans retrospectively backing the liberation of Iraq:
Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. . . . Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out.
In the Times’s view, as explained on its website, this result was “counterintuitive”–so much so that the editors had the poll repeated to see whether they had “gotten it right.” Turns out they had.
As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto commented: “Well, two cheers for the paper’s diligence, but this also seems to be about as close as we’re going to get to an admission of bias: an acknowledgment that those at the Times are flummoxed that the public is not responding the way they expect to all the bad news they’ve been reporting.”
What’s striking is that the Times was flummoxed. In the real world, the news from Iraq had been (relatively) good for a couple of months. General David Petraeus’s military success had been followed with striking political achievements in Anbar province. At home, a mood of annoyance at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war had started to yield to a realization that we were approaching a choice of paths on Iraq, and that the consequences of embracing defeat would be severe. But that’s not the world the Times editors live in. In their world, this is a war that should never have been fought and that has long been irretrievably lost–and everyone should simply accept those settled facts.
In the real world, the public is skeptical of the administration’s stance on Iraq–but not overwhelmingly or irretrievably so. Here’s what a new Rasmussen poll says: “Twenty-five percent of voters now say the troop surge is working and another 26 percent say it’s too soon to tell. A month ago, just 19 percent considered the surge a success and 24 percent said it was too early to tell.” This means that 51 percent are now at least open to giving the policy more time. That’s up from 43 percent a month ago. …
John Fund posts on the YearlyKos convention and Zimbabwe. Sounds about right.
Nicole Gelinas in City Journal has more on infrastructure problems.
It’s not clear why a major section of the nation’s interstate highway system collapsed Wednesday night over the Mississippi River in Minnesota, causing a still unknown number of fatalities and indefinitely severing an important transportation link. But one thing has been all too clear for decades: America is neglecting its vital physical infrastructure, and the bill is coming due.
As a nation, we’ve long borrowed from our future; everybody knows about the inevitable Social Security and Medicare crises that will happen in the next three decades as the number of retirees expands in relation to the number of workers. Far fewer people understand that we’ve also been borrowing from our past. The federal highway system, the backbone of America’s modern economy, turned 50 last year. But, as I wrote in Forbes magazine in April, we haven’t spent enough, or thought enough, to keep it—and other physical assets that previous generations built—in good working order. We spend only 60 percent of what’s needed to keep roads in good condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. In New York State, for instance, 35 percent of major roads are in “poor or mediocre condition,†the ASCE says, while 38 percent of bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.†…
Fred Thompson on eminent domain abuse.
… Our Founders placed respect for private property as a key principle when writing our nation’s Constitution, and the protection of private property resulted in the United States becoming the greatest economic power in the world and a beacon of freedom to all. This principle is even more important today, as homeownership has become an increasingly integral part of our citizens’ aspirations for a better future for themselves and their loved ones. If the Supreme Court will not protect our right to ownership, then political leaders must step up to the challenge.
Edwards caught bloviating again. The Captain does the honors.
… He had no trouble working with Murdoch’s publishing empire when they dangled $800,000 in front of him. Had he found Murdoch so offensive, he could have taken his book elsewhere; it’s not like another publisher would have hesitated to get the book. Edwards simply took the best offer and didn’t care who wrote the check.
Edwards has transformed himself from an ambulance chaser to a substanceless suit, and now to a classless hypocrite. Even Ann Coulter can’t save this embarrassment.
American Thinker posts on NY Times and law prof at Harvard who team up to slur orthodox Jews.
Noah Feldman has a lot of explaining to do. The Harvard Law School professor published an article in the New York Times Magazine slamming Orthodox Judaism, taking as its departure point the cropping of Feldman and his Korean-American wife from a picture run in the alumni bulletin of the Maimonides School, the Orthodox yeshiva he attended in Brookline, MA. Both Richard Baehr and Ralph M. Lieberman took issue with his approach and the journalistic ethics of the Times in publishing such material.
Now it turns out that there is a bit of a scandal underlying the article, which created a clearly misleading impression of what transpired. And both the author and the New York Times knew that they were misleading readers in order to create a falsely unfavorable impression of the Maimonides School. …
City Journal starts off a couple of comments on the News Corp. purchase of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.
Help, the sky is falling! So say the pro-regulation media agitators at Free Press, which fired off what is sure to be the first of many hysteria-ridden press releases about Rupert Murdoch’s successful acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones & Co. “This takeover is bad news for anyone who cares about quality journalism and a healthy democracy,†argued Robert W. McChesney, president of Free Press. “Giving any single company—let alone one controlled by Rupert Murdoch—this much media power is unconscionable.â€
The argument that the Murdoch–Dow Jones marriage will have a significant impact on American journalism or democracy is absurd. …
… What Murdoch is really after is the value that goes with the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal brand names. Those brands, and the enormous talent behind them, will give Murdoch a fighting chance in his ongoing push to expand into financial journalism and develop a financial-news cable channel. Anything that degrades those brands, or drives away the companies’ talent, will hurt Murdoch’s chances of capturing the sophisticated audience that he’s seeking. …
The Australian (owned by News Corp.) has some comments too.
… Then there is the fact that Murdoch’s acquisition of the Journal is a poke in the eye for The New York Times. I am only slightly motivated by malice in making this comment.
The Times is a great newspaper, which I have been reading, with fairly brief gaps, for close to 50 years, frequently spluttering with rage over its soft left biases but full of admiration for its vast reach across news spectrums.
However, under the direction of its publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, who took over the paper in 1992, the fourth generation of the Sulzberger family to hold the job, the paper’s soft leftism has, so to speak, gradually thickened. …
… There are penalties to be paid for watching Fox, such as getting stuck with the windbag strutting of Bill O’Reilly. But O’Reilly’s blathering is a minor test of endurance compared with the poison pen of New York Times oped columnist Frank Rich.
It was Rich who deemed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ homoerotic, having led the Times’s virulent, year-long assault on the movie and its maker, which was based initially on a fragment of a draft script, probably stolen. Last week Rich displayed his talent for venomous hyperbole under the oped column headline “Who Really Took Over During That (Bush’s) Colonoscopy?” Rich’s answer: General David Petraeus.
Competition from another national elitist general interest paper will be good for the Times.
Murdoch’s Journal will undoubtedly dent its smugness, most recently exposed by its incredulity when a New York Times-CBS opinion poll showed a slight increase in support for Bush’s Iraq strategy.
Outraged that people weren’t following its lead, the Times had the poll repeated, with the same result. Reporting this, the Times declared not that the poll was right but that “we” were. …