It's an odd feeling to be cheering Sarah Steelman for doing the right thing. (Though I still have a wary eye out for an ulterior motive in her announcement that she has changed her mind about the ethanol mandate in Missouri.) She now opposes it.
Missouri requires that 10 percent of all gasoline be ethanol, and Steelman chose "a busy Springfield street side for her announcement that 'within 100 days of being elected Governor, I will do everything in my power to repeal the ethanol mandate in Missouri.'"
She opposes the mandate because "it has produced higher food prices and higher costs for farmers since going into effect January 1."
The Missouri Corngrowers Association, predictably, disagrees, but let me just say, before I present their side of it, that Mark Twain's observation is particularly apt here: "Tell me where a man gets his corn pone, and I'll tell you what his 'pinions is." Anyway, here's the corn growers' spin:
"Removing the ethanol requirement in Missouri would only increase prices at the pump for already hurting consumers."
The corngrowers tell us that using ethanol will save Missourians $285 million this year and over $2 billion over the next ten years.
Among progressives, some of us are for ethanol use, others are agin it. Ken Midkiff of the Missouri Sierra Club, in an op-ed piece that he wrote for the Joplin Globe, lays out the case against it (and, by the way, the case against drilling in ANWR).
He's convincing. Read on past the Midkiff excerpt to see what McCaskill and Obama have to say on the ethanol question.
Pogo famously said "We have met the enemy and he is us."
That is where we find ourselves when it comes to the high price per gallon of gasoline (which seems to go up almost daily).
While it is only human to want to blame someone, such as "liberals and environmentalists," the fact is that we are all to blame. We have used oil and oil products, such as gasoline, as if there was no tomorrow.
