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Biofuels

09th April 2009

I was talking to a guy the other day and he was bitching about the price of gas going up again so I suggested that if we really wanted to do something about it we could take the Brazilian path and make it economically attractive to run vehicles on biofuels that are from the US. He freaked on me and started talking about how that wasn’t possible and that was partly the reason food was so expensive. I’ve never been sure if those kind of people are neocons who want to keep their Big Oil cronies rolling in cash or liberals that aren’t very smart. I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh say the same sort of stupid crap (I’ll set aside for a moment that I lost any respect for him I may have had when he got caught with illegal prescriptions after saying anybody who used illegal drugs should go to prison. I agree, he should be in prison). Here’s the thing…. I’ve been all over and there is a lot of open space in the US that’s suitable for growing sugar cane or sugar beets or soybeans or any of the dozens of other plants suitable for use in biofuels.

My conspiracy theory craziness thinks it has a lot to do with Big Oil not wanting the competition and Big Government (and I include both the reds and the blues in that category) being terrified that they won’t be able to tax biofuels. Biodiesel and ethanol can both be brewed up relatively easy in your backyard. For Big Oil this means that they can’t manipulate the price of oil. I know, I know, they say they don’t already. It’s all “speculators” fault. But have you ever noticed that when the price gets really high and people start talking about windfall profits taxes the price drops for a few months until something new comes along — like say thieves at AIG raping the US Treasury– then they inch their way back up? For Big Government it means you lose the ability to tax fuels. How do you tax a gallon of something when you don’t have any idea how many gallons of it are being used?

Bad for Big Everybody. Of course it would also mean that we wouldn’t have to care what the Middle East was doing and they could go back to being camel jockeys.

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