{"id":3863,"date":"2010-12-23T05:55:59","date_gmt":"2010-12-23T05:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3863"},"modified":"2010-12-23T05:55:59","modified_gmt":"2010-12-23T05:55:59","slug":"2011_and_still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3863","title":{"rendered":"2011: And Still No Energy Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Wallace:<\/a><\/p>\n

“First generation [corn] ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.”
\n– Al Gore, speaking at a Green Energy Conference on November 22, 2010
\n“Ethanol is not an ideal transportation fuel. The future of transportation fuels shouldn’t involve ethanol.”
\n– Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, November 29, 2010
\nNo one knows what brought on the blast of political honesty in the last eight days of November. Having been a rabid ethanol booster for most of his political career, there was former Vice President Al Gore reversing course and apologizing for supporting ethanol. Of course Gore’s reason for taking that position was perfectly understandable — for a politician. As he told the Athens energy conference attendees, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”
\nTranslated from politics-speak into English, pandering to farmers gets votes. But if your claimed position is to plan some sort of energy policy for everyone else, then getting farmers’ votes shouldn’t determine what’s the right thing to do for the nation’s fuel supplies.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Wallace:<\/a><\/p>\n

“First generation [corn] ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.”
\n– Al Gore, speaking at a Green Energy Conference on November 22, 2010
\n“Ethanol is not an ideal transportation fuel. The future of transportation fuels shouldn’t involve ethanol.”
\n– Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, November 29, 2010
\nNo one knows what brought on the blast of political honesty in the last eight days of November. Having been a rabid ethanol booster for most of his political career, there was former Vice President Al Gore reversing course and apologizing for supporting ethanol. Of course Gore’s reason for taking that position was perfectly understandable — for a politician. As he told the Athens energy conference attendees, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”
\nTranslated from politics-speak into English, pandering to farmers gets votes. But if your claimed position is to plan some sort of energy policy for everyone else, then getting farmers’ votes shouldn’t determine what’s the right thing to do for the nation’s fuel supplies.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,39,5,8,29,40,9,34,17,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}