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Gore’s Gas-Based Admission

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Al Gore gives the impression of someone never willing to acknowledge error if said error happens to be self-serving.

This impression is wrong.

If I have ever suggested that Gore never admits self-serving mistakes, I hereby rescind and repudiate that suggestion. He appears more than willing to retire a dishonest assertion . . . so long as he has another dishonest assertion to replace it with.

Ed Morrissey tells the tale at Hot Air, opining that Al Gore’s revised opinion about the virtue of government subsidies for corn-based ethanol seems just a little too convenient.

Gore now acknowledges that the energy-conversion ratios of first-generation ethanol “are at best very small,” and that corn subsidies probably bid up food prices. He even admits that he pushed for the funding to help farmers in states like Tennessee and Iowa. So it came to pass that taxpayers paid billions, in part to help Gore run for president.

Wait, there’s more.

Having recanted his support for “first-generation” ethanol, Gore now wants to use wood and grass to make ethanol. A new and better way, n’est-ce pas? No. There’s this small detail: Grass etc.-based ethanol is even more inefficient than corn-based ethanol.

Why top a bad blunder at taxpayer expense with an even worse blunder at taxpayer expense? Could this have anything to do with Al Gore’s investment in Abengoa Bioenergy, a firm begging for government subsidies for second-generation ethanol?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

5 replies on “Gore’s Gas-Based Admission”

LITTLE OR NO MENTION. BUT, IF IT WAS A MEMBER-NO MATTER HOW FAR REMOVED,FROM THE PALIN, BUSH OR CHENEY FAMILY, PROBABLY FRONT PAGE AND EDITORIAL PAGE FOR WEEKS.

Still, not out of line with what you’d expect for someone that just barely broke 1000 on his SATs and who got a C- on the one science course he took at school.
Something about a silk purse…

The whole thing on ethanol would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid. Brazil makes ethanol profitable because they use SUGAR, which has much more energy. We can’t use sugar because the government sugar subsidies raise the price so much that it’s uneconomical. We can’t import Brazilian ethanol because of tarrifs protecting our ethanol producers.
So basically government meddling in the free market conspires against a viable option…..

Gore is like a lot of politicians, they invest in a company, then get the government to pass laws (often very small pieces of 1000 page bills) that drive up the value of the company. Thus they make themselves richer at citizens’ expense.

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