Philobiblon

No one could accuse Anatole Kaletsky of being a Green, but he offers some salutory thoughts on Bush’s State of the Union address:

All three of the President’s new energy policies ideas announced on Tuesday — to increase the use of corn-based ethanol in US petrol from 5 per cent to about 30 per cent, to raise fuel-economy standards by 10 per cent and to promote “clean coal” technology for electric power generation — will distort investment and research spending, channelling the lion’s share of available resources into some of the least promising solutions to climate change.
Extracting ethanol from corn, for example, is less than one-tenth as efficient as distilling it from sugar cane. But because of the lobbying power of agribusiness in the Midwest cornbelt, the US severely restricts the import of Brazilian sugar-ethanol and will now spend vast amounts on technology and subsidies designed to undercut the sugar-ethanol technologies with far greater potential for reducing global carbon emissions at reasonable cost.
Similarly, the 10 per cent proposed improvement in vehicle economy standards is so modest that it will divert investment from the much bigger improvements in fuel consumption that could easily be achieved if US consumers could be persuaded to drive lighter and better-designed cars. The same could be true of “clean coal” technology, which may well end up far less clean than its promoters are contending and will deflect resources from nuclear and solar research.