The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 308
Gasoline companies no longer need to own filling stations to control the market.
They’ve done it by buying politicians and car company CEOs. Real competition
between gasoline brands has been eliminated through mergers and mandated
gasoline formulas: there is virtually no difference between them. Service stations no longer offer free drinking glasses, dishes, or trading stamps because
they no longer have to compete for business.
5. You wrote, “The EIA calculates that federal oil and gas subsidies outside the electricity sector total $30,000 per million British thermal units
(BTUs). Biofuel subsidies outside the electricity sector, however, ($3 billion of the $3.2 billion of which are directed at ethanol via the blenders’
tax credit), work out to $5.72 million per million BTU (EIA, 2008, Table 36).
Using EIA figures for oil and gas subsidies and estimates of the cost of
the blender’s tax credit from Koplow (2007), economist Douglas Tiffany
(2008) calculates that oil subsidies in 2007 were slightly less than $0.15
per gallon of gasoline while ethanol subsidies totaled $0.588 per gallon.
Whether we embrace a narrow or broad definition of subsidy, the conclusion is the same; oil subsidies are relatively trivial while ethanol subsidies
are relatively substantial.”
The 2007 gasoline subsidy that you cite most likely did not include the cost of
fighting a war in Iraq and a war in Afghanistan. It probably also did not include
the cost of stationing air force units in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other oil producing nations. The subsidy probably also did not include the cost of our navy
protecting and escorting oil tankers (even those not registered to the U.S.). I’d
be surprised to learn that the subsidy included the cost of beefing up the protection of American embassies around the world. And the 2007 subsidy definitely did not take into account the cost of the lives of the U.S. servicemen who
died while fighting these wars and protecting the oil/gasoline assets. Protection
subsidies like these have been paid by our government every year since at least
the First World War.
There is nothing trivial about the subsidies that have been and are given to
gasoline. Your estimation of them as “relatively trivial” is merely an indication of
your moral depravity.
6. You wrote, “Proponents of ethanol subsidies argue that if the price of
oil included the cost of our “oil mission” in the Middle East, the wars that
the U.S. military engages there to protect oil supplies, the costs associated with our need to “kiss the ring” of Middle Eastern oil producers, the
economic damage by terrorists from the flow of petrodollars into their
