Energy & Environment

President Bush, still fresh from his recent trip to South America, touted progress in sealing a deal with Brazil to develop its ethanol industry for export to the United States. In a sense this was Bush's double play against both the Middle East and Venezuela President Hugo Chávez who, despite being thorns in Mr. Bush's side, cannot be ignored as long as the U.S. remains dependent on foreign oil. Clearly, this new deal made Chávez nervous. Not only did he scamper to Argentina during Bush's Brazil visit to drum up the anti-American fervor, he dragged Cuba's Fidel Castro out of his deathbed to rail against the diversion of food crops to biofuel production. Antics aside, though, Chávez and Castro have a point: Ever since Bush unveiled his Renewable Fuel Standards initiative — requiring the country to use 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel over the next six years — demand for corn has gone through the roof, increasing the prices of dependent commodities from wheat futures to pork bellies. Is America ready to pay more for food in exchange for lessened dependence on foreign oil? We'll see.

Newt Gingrich debated John Kerry yesterday on the environment. Sort of.

It has been an open secret that Newt has always been a green Republican. He never has been as open about his green tendencies as he was yesterday, though. And I think from a practical political perspective, Newt is right.

Most of Big Business has already reached the conclusion that being green sells products. It is more of an attitude than an actual coherent policy perspective, but corporate marketers all understand that it can be easy being green. Read more...

The Al Gore Environmental Express was in town a few weeks ago preaching the doom and gloom of modern environmentalism. According to his testimony, the sky is falling, the oceans are drying up and the earth is becoming infertile. And to top it off, according to Gore it is all the fault of American enterprise, this despite the fact Gore’s home alone accounts for over half of the energy used in Tennessee every year.

Now, it’s not that I don’t believe in the importance of the environment, it’s just that I’ve heard all of these gloom-and-doom prophecies before. After all, in the ’60s we were told that the world would undergo a famine and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death, and in the ’70s Europe’s distinguished scientists announced that we would run out of gold by the ’80s. Even a U.S. president was found drinking the Kool-Aid of environmental gloom and doom when he announced that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the next decade.” (Although in all fairness, Jimmy Carter is a bit like a college sophomore when it comes to intellectual fads.) Read more...