Call Your Congress Member... Call Your Senators...

To anyone reading this who somehow doesn't already know that ethanol is a scam... just google the phrase "ethanol is a scam" and see what you get.

To those looking for a less... er... loaded search term... try googling "corn based ethanol".

Seriously - to anyone who has until now somehow escaped stumbling upon the truth about ethanol - you can either take my word for it, or better yet, do your own research. Take fifteen minutes, a half hour... go nuts, take an entire hour (if you can spare it) to browse the scientific and economic literate concerning Archer Daniels Midland's favorite source of corporate welfare.

To paraphrase a headline right out of today's Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages... Everyone Should Hate Ethanol.

Excerpting:

These days, it's routine for businesses to fail, get rescued by the government, and then continue to fail. But ethanol, which survives only because of its iron lung of subsidies and mandates, is a special case. Naturally, the industry is demanding even more government life support.

Corn ethanol producers - led by Wesley Clark, the retired general turned chairman of a new biofuels lobbying outfit called Growth Energy - want the Obama Administration to make their guaranteed market even larger. Recall that the 2007 energy bill requires refiners to mix 36 billion gallons into the gasoline supply by 2022. The quotas, which ratchet up each year, are arbitrary, but evidently no one in Congress wondered what might happen if the economy didn't cooperate.

Americans are unlikely to use enough gas next year to absorb the 13 billion gallons of ethanol that Congress mandated, because current regulations limit the ethanol content in each gallon of gas at 10%. The industry is asking that this cap be lifted to 15% or even 20%. That way, more ethanol can be mixed with less gas, and producers won't end up with a glut that the government does not require anyone to buy.

The ethanol boosters aren't troubled that only a fraction of the 240 million cars and trucks on the road today can run with ethanol blends higher than 10%. It can damage engines and corrode automotive pipes, as well as impair some safety features, especially in older vehicles. It can also overwhelm pollution control systems like catalytic converters. The malfunctions multiply in other products that use gas, such as boats, snowmobiles, lawnmowers, chainsaws, etc.

That possible policy train wreck is uniting almost every other Washington lobby - and talk about strange bedfellows. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Motorcycle Industry Council and the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, among others, are opposed, since raising the blend limit will ruin their products. The left-leaning American Lung Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists are opposed too, since it will increase auto emissions. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club agree, on top of growing scientific evidence that corn ethanol provides little or no net reduction in CO2 over the gasoline it displaces.

The biggest losers in this scheme are U.S. oil refiners. Liability for any problems arising from ethanol blending rests with them, because Congress refused to grant legal immunity for selling a product that complies with the mandates that it ordered. The refiners are also set to pay stiff fines for not fulfilling Congress's mandates for second-generation cellulosic ethanol. But the cellulosic ethanol makers themselves already concede that they won't be able to churn out enough of the stuff - 100 million gallons next year, 250 million gallons in 2011 - to meet the targets that Congress wrote two years ago.

So successful but politically unpopular businesses will be punished for not buying a product that does not exist - from companies that haven't yet found a way to succeed despite generous political and taxpayer advantages. The next step is to use cap and trade to make green alternatives look artificially good by comparison. Even then they'll probably still be bottomless money pits.

To recap: Congress and the ethanol lobby argue that if some outcome would be politically nice, it should be mandated (details to follow). Then a new round of market interventions is necessary to fix the economic harm resulting from the previous requirements, while creating more damage in the process. Ethanol is one of the most shameless energy rackets going, in a field with no shortage of competitors.

Here's the deal folks: This is a non-partisan issue - or at least it should be. It's not "Republicans vs. Democrats," or "Liberals vs. Conservatives," or even "Environmentalists vs. Corporate America." (Heck... you don't get much more "corporate" than Archer Daniels Midland.) What it is about is money - the money Archer Daniels Midland and other players hope to wring out of American taxpayers and the money Archer Daniels Midland and other players are willing to spread around to the politicians - both Democrat and Republican - in order to buy... er... "win" their support.

Up against the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and Wesley Clark are... us.

If you don't have the phone numbers for your Member of the House and two U.S. Senators handy or even if you don't know who they are, if you click here all you need to do is fill in your address and all three names and Washington D.C. telephone numbers will pop up.

Folks... a couple minutes of your time... contact your federal representatives and tell them you oppose expansion of the corn based ethanol scam; tell them you're sick of paying more to get less while at the same time not benefiting the environment!

Be polite. Identify yourself as a constituent and a voter. Tell the staffer you speak to that their boss, your representative, needs to read the Wall Street Journal editorial titled "Everyone Hates Ethanol" found on page A-18 of today's newspaper and that you expect your representative to represent your interests - not the special interests.