Tuesday’s Energy absurdity : Blackmon on Biofuels
Note: I made the following comments about various biofuels scams on this week’s episode of The Energy Realities Podcast. But, knowing that some of you prefer to read stuff rather than watch a podcast
Tuesday’s Energy absurdity : Blackmon on Biofuels
[Note: I made the following comments about the various biofuels scams on this week’s episode of The Energy Realities Podcast. But, knowing that some of you prefer to read stuff rather than watch a podcast, I decided to publish this transcript of my comments here as well.]
We can blame the evil geniuses in the George W Bush administration for this atrocity. They're the ones who really created the big subsidy programs for biofuels. The Clinton administration had done a little bit on it, but it was really the George W Bush administration virtue signaling about all this crap.
It's just like wind and solar. It's a big cottage industry, and a lot of people have a invested in it. Their livelihoods depend on it. And [Tammy Nemeth’s] point about the farmers becoming dependent on these subsidies is really phenomenal.
There's an extremely popular show that I know Tammy is familiar with in the UK, and it's now on Amazon Prime. It's called Clarkson's Farm. Jeremy Clarkson, The Top Gear guy. My wife and I have been binge-watching it this past week. It is such a fantastic revelation about how it impacts farmers in Great Britain to be completely reliant on all these heavy subsidies coming from the EU and all this government control, controlling what they plant and when they plant it and how they do it and blah, blah, blah, what you can and can't do. You can't even build a road on your own farm now.
But it all got taken away during Covid and right after Covid. All those subsidies got taken away because the conservative government under Boris Johnson said, oh, well, don't worry about it. When we do Brexit, your own government will fill in those subsidies. Well, they took them all away during Covid and after Covid.
So now you've got hundreds and hundreds of British farmers either having already failed or on the verge of failure because they, their whole livelihoods depended on those subsidies.
It’s the same now in the United States. Corn farmers have become completely addicted to these subsidies for biofuels, and not just corn farmers, but other farmers.
So now it's this whole thing. It's this whole big subsidy thing that we're incurring. It's all funded with more and more debt, just like all the subsidies for wind and solar and everything else in this energy transition.
And if you take it away, well, what's going to happen? All the family farms that are completely dependent on these subsidies now to stay in business are going to go out of business. And Bill Gates is going to own everything, and other billionaires and corporations are going to going to control the whole farming system.
So, the government is now, they have this problem facing them because we can't afford the subsidies anymore. We really can't. The fuels that are created don't really provide any benefit in terms of the environment at all. None. Zero. Some of them are actually actively destructive to the environment. They're all destructive to the food system.
But you've got this monster you've created, and, whichever president decides, who happens to be in office when it all goes away, won't be winning reelection. So, it's a real problem here in the US, and I know it is in other countries as well.
And you're taking so much food out of the food system. Our exports of grain out of the United States and other countries, Ukraine and all these other countries, really help feed the world, and have for decades and decades, and we're in the process of now destroying all that. And it's going to, I mean, it's just inevitable: It's going to create an absolute catastrophe, a human life killing catastrophe if we don't stop and reverse a lot of these policies.
It's just so sad that we don't ever seem able to elect anyone who really understands the problem and wants to correct it.
That is all.