Ethanol is a magic elixir. It allows politicians and political operatives to promise voters that America can achieve “energy independence.” In this new energy Valhalla, American farmers will be rich, fat and happy, thanks to all of the money they will be making from “energy crops.”
Read morePaulo Sotero Marques is the director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Read moreThe numbers tell the story at Petrobras. Over the past four years, the company’s stock price has increased about ten-fold. In the past decade its oil production has doubled to roughly 1.9 million barrels of oil per day.
Read moreWind power is the electricity sector’s equivalent of ethanol — the hype has lost all connection with reality. Last month, a coalition of renewable energy boosters, the American Council on Renewable Energy, released a report claiming that it is “technically feasible to increase wind capacity to supply 20 percent of this nation’s electricity by 2030.”
Read moreMost of the time, I believe that the U.S. and other Western countries, can, if they really work at it, bridge the cultural gap and reach some kind of understanding with the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Read moreThe ethanol boosters and neoconservatives just can’t help themselves. Whenever challenged on the facts, they reflexively respond “Saudi Arabia.” Merely invoking the name of the world’s biggest oil producer allows them to conflate the issues of oil and terrorism, and in the process, provide justification for the billions of subsidy dollars required to keep the ethanol scam alive and well.
Read moreRoger Pielke, Sr. is professor emeritus of meteorology at Colorado State University and currently a senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Read moreFor the past eight years, Jennifer L. Turner has been director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. in public policy and comparative politics from Indiana University in 1997.
Read moreLast month, George W. Bush traveled to Sao Paolo to discuss, among other things, the prospects for increasing the amount of Brazilian ethanol that can be provided to the U.S. market.
Read moreMark Mills is the co-author (with Peter Huber) of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.
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