Okay, that’s even worse than a mixed metaphor: that’s a Friedmanism.  But it still applies today. Reuters reports:

Two U.S. governors asked the United States government on Tuesday to waive this year’s mandate for making ethanol from corn, adding pressure on it to relieve meat producers from high corn prices spurred by the worst drought in more than 50 years.

As legendary Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman once commented, “nobody knows anything.”  But even then, everyone should know that ethanol is a zit on the face of US energy and environmental policy.  As a matter of lifecycle calculations, it takes so much energy to produce ethanol, and ethanol is itself such a mediocre fuel that it hardly saves any carbon emissions at all.  But there it is, copiously subsidized by Congress, thanks to Archer Daniels Midland and the rest of agribusiness.

The environmental and energy aspects, of course, can hardly be counted on to move Congress. But don’t mess with a cattleman –  or a pigman.  The National Pork Producers Council has also petitioned EPA, USDA, and DOE to waive the ethanol mandate.  From the piggies’ perspective, ethanol subsidies (UPDATE: and the accompanying mandate, of course,) are bad because they ...

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