Republican presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann, has vowed to lock the doors and turn out the lights on the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, at a rally last week if she is elected. Moreover, she’s promised $2/gal gasoline.
As the presidential campaign revs up this fall, candidates will be touting promises that their platform will be better than that of their competition.
So what do bureaucratic politics have to do with ethanol or American homegrown energy?
Let us first focus on the $2/gal empty promise. Believe me, it sounds incredibly appetizing. As a broke college student, $4/gal at the pump can drive a girl to want to crave Ramen again or raid the entire maid’s cart while on vacation.
Wait a second. We’re not talking ethanol. She promises that gasoline will reach below $2 a gallon. Well, there are only two direct ways to reach such a heavily subsidized and frugal price for petroleum. Option number one: Increase the petroleum industry’s subsidies or tax breaks (this money doesn’t come from anywhere. It comes from you. And I. And everyone else. Is Michele going to raise taxes, too, to pay for these additional subsidies?). Option number two: increase drilling in ecologically fragile regions of the United States alongside negligent companies. When black tar desecrates all life forms in the Gulf of Mexico or pipelines burst in the Tundra (both of which have happened within the past couple years), who is ultimately held liable for the corporations that are too large to care? Taxpayers? Yes. You, and I.
These approaches could make way for a quasi deflated price at the pump that’s closer to $2/gal (at least it looks that way when we go to select ‘Debit’ or ‘Credit’). But subsidies, taxpayer money, drain our pockets in the first place to drive the price down. In the end, we still pay the difference.
Currently, ethanol is cheaper than gasoline at the pump. And Michele has yet to extrapolate on a plan to drive down the cost of ethanol, too. Well, it’s already cheaper than gasoline. It’s grown here in the Midwest. When was the last time we had an ethanol spill? When was the last time family farmers had beg for gov’t assistance to clean up a burst pipeline on their farms?
Yet she wants to close the doors on the EPA, the very agency that recently updated a revised ratio for a greater mixture of ethanol in commercial gasoline (up 15% from 10%). She wants to turn out all lights in the EPA, the very agency that wants to proliferate this homegrown fuel into further depths within our economy.

Lights out, ethanol.