At 07:52 PM 01/29/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote:
Remember the Synfuel boondoggles under Jimmy Carter?On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 06:33 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 07:53:21PM -0500, Jamie Lawrence wrote:One of the problems I think is rampant with, for instance, getting alternate fuel sources off the ground is that government subsidies are ensuring they don't happen by distorting the market for fossil fuels.
Cracking otherwise-uneconomical oil shale might have been
a useful technology if the price of oil were $50-100/barrel.
(Meanwhile, we can feel nice and liberal about leaving all this
wonderful supply of irreplaceable industrial hydrocarbons for future generations.)
The subsidies for corn ethanol are indicative of the problem with interfering in markets:
-- someone decided "corn good, oil bad!"
-- those with a lot of corn, like Archer Daniels,
sent in their lobbyists to push for this point of view
Bob Dole, Senator from ADM, Republican protector of free markets. One reason for corn ethanol instead of sugar ethanol is that that the US prices for sugar are artificially kept high with import tariffs (and of course with the Cuba embargo), which is also why soda is mostly made from corn syrup instead of sugar.
As for Iraq, letting them keep Kuwait in 1990-91 almost certainly would have driven the price of oil _DOWN_. A nation like Iraq is more interested in pumping than in hoarding,
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve made some seriously incompetent moves with its timing of buying and selling oil around Desert Scam, at least if their goals were related to moderating price swings, making oil available to US industry, or to managing their costs. When the market was really tight and prices were rising, they bought heavily, paying a lot more than they should have and making oil scarcer in the US, and when the war was largely decided and oil prices were dropping because there was no major need for hoarding, they started dumping their oil, depressing prices further.
And don't decide that "cornohol" (sounds like "cornhole,"doesn't it?) or "biodiesel" or "miracle weed" is something that markets ought to be distorted in favor of....else we'll get the kind of market distortions cited above, and a non-optimum solution.
Well, the indirect market manipulation policies are definitely skewed in favor of Miracle Weed from high-tech California growers instead of ditchweed from Kansas or Mexico.
