More pork! Clinton indulges Iowans with renewable fuel standards promise

Eating a pork chop on a stick was not the biggest pander Hillary Clinton committed in Iowa, as she became the latest presidential candidate to promise support for the Renewable Fuels Standards (RFS), a bad farm policy, a worse environmental policy, and a terrible energy policy. Requiring that oil refiners blend a certain amount of ethanol into gasoline, which increases every year, has created a number of problems for the oil industry and gasoline consumers.

It is a true triple threat: bad in concept, bad in design and bad in implementation. “Mandates” should acquire the same negative connotation that “pork” does in Washington (not in the kitchen) because they are invariably inefficient and also dishonest. Instead of a direct expenditure or subsidy whose cost is clear to the public, it forces producers to accept the additional cost and pass them on to consumers, leaving the latter especially ignorant.

Ask yourself this: in what other field does the government mandate the amount of a substance in a consumer product? Does your seafood chowder have a mandated amount of lobster? If Maine held the first presidential primaries, it probably would. Of course, mandating ethanol in gasoline is more like requiring all bread to have a certain amount of corn meal in it. Or that shirts should contain a minimum amount of cotton, regardless of the fabric.

The negative effects of the RFS are well established, and the benefits minimal. Greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced significantly since ethanol production requires a significant amount of energy. (Many environmentalists do not support the RFS for that reason, as well as the more intensive use of land.) The additional displacement of imported oil from the mandate is small, and dwarfed by the increase in oil production from fracking—which benefits consumers and taxpayers.

Mandates like this are automatically inefficient because they force consumption down unnatural or non-optimal paths. The oil industry would use ethanol without a mandate, because it is the octane enhancer of choice. But because politicians set specific levels of consumption, the industry theoretically needs to put varying amounts of ethanol into gasoline without regard for the needs of the international combustion engine. An excessive amount of ethanol is thought to be damaging to automobile engines: as a consumer with a gasoline powered lawnmower, I can angrily attest that even the 10% standard is a problem for small motors.

We’ve come a long way from John Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.” The sequel should be “Profiles in Pandering.” Clinton, and her competitors, should at the least be honest about the costs being imposed. Instead, they adopt an attitude of “Damn the consumer, full speed ahead to the White House.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2015/08/27/more-pork-clinton-indulges-iowans-with-renewable-fuel-standards-promise/?ss=energy