One of Barack Obama’s favorite lines of attack on John McCain last election was to criticize McCain for regularly voting against “renewable energy.” If you check the 23 votes Obama’s campaign cited for this criticism you’ll see that largely, Obama was attacking McCain for opposing ethanol subsidies and mandates.
Indeed, Obama wanted to require all new cars made in the U.S. to run flex-fuel — another mandate forcing ethanol on U.S. consumers.
We should be grateful he seems to have backed away from his whole-hearted support for the ethanol industry, given the news in today’s New York Times piece:
To please the farm lobby and to help wean the nation off oil, Congress mandated that refiners blend a rising volume of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline. They are supposed to use at least 15 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012, up from less than seven billion gallons in 2007….
At the maximum allowable blend, in which gasoline at the pump contains 10 percent ethanol, updated projections suggest that the country is unlikely to be able to use all the ethanol that Congress has ordered up.
