New York Times Covers the Ethanol Scam

1. New York Times Covers the Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Mandates Spawn Credits That Enrich Wall Street Speculators, Rip Off Consumers Crown Capital Management Environmental Reviews

2. The New York Times ran a front page story Sunday  on a new outrage resulting from one of the biggest scams in America today, ethanol mandates, and how they have made American consumers poorer, while enriching Wall Street profiteers through ethanol credits.  The story is entitled “Wall St. Exploits Ethanol Credits, and Prices Spike,” and focuses on the rapidly growing role of Wall Street banks in gaming the ethanol credits market. Ethanol credits (or RINs, as they’re called) were created by the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress as a way to assure the inclusion of ethanol in gasoline as an energy-saving measure. But gasoline producers who couldn’t or didn’t want to include ethanol could buy credits from those who did. . . In stepped the speculators, amassing millions of credits and making a killing on the wide spread between the bid and ask prices of the credits. Predictably, this drove the price through the roof: the credits, which cost 7 cents each in January, peaked at $1.43 in July and now are trading for 60 cents.

3. The net result is that consumers will pay at the pump, notes investment adviser David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors.  As he  observes, ethanol mandates are having very negative “geopolitical effects” as well.  He agrees that “Ethanol was a bad policy, primarily to buy and reward grain-state votes. It spurred grain planting to meet the mandate, but not fast enough, so prices called out for more. The poor were hurt overseas,” and unrest in the Middle East ensued.  As Kotokpoints out, ethanol is a massive scam. Our national policy diverts 40% of the U.S. corn crop (14% of the global corn crop) in order to produce a fuel that requires almost as much energy to produce as it supplies. Our ethanol mandate has starved millions of people; I’ve watched it with my own eyes in many countries in my travels. A 2011 study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that, since 2007, the expanding U.S. biofuels subsidy has fueled 20%-40% of the increase the world has seen in the prices for agricultural commodities. . . .. . . .

4. At Hot Air, Erika Johnsen notes that it is the government that created the “stupid ethanol-credit system.”  She says that while ethanol mandates are indeed harmful, the New York Times places too much of the blame on Wall Street, and too little on the federal ethanol mandates that spawned trafficking in ethanol by speculators.  She observes that the profiteering and price increases the Times decries are economically an entirely predictable result of the. . . . . Renewable Fuel Standard, the regulation that requires U.S. refiners to increase an ever-increasing volume of certain biofuels into the nation’s gasoline supply. . . . the Obama administration has done everything they can to bolster and expand the RFS, and refiners must either comply with the RFS or else purchase credits known as renewable identification numbers (RINs) to effectively purchase an exemption. The ongoing political biofuels-battle was ramped up a notch this summer as energy companies have been cautioning that we’re running up against the “blend wall,” the 10 percent threshold beyond which they warn the blended fuels will no longer be acceptable for most cars and trucks, which means demand for the credits have been spiking and prices have been rising (also perhaps exacerbated by the fact the the EPA

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