Emily Schwartz Greco: Trump slurbs up the ethanol scam

As the “lamestream” media, late-night talk show hosts, and Sarah Palin impersonator-in-chief Tina Fey lapped up the former Alaska governor’s first remarks to Donald Trump’s “right-wingin’ bitter-clingin’” supporters, one of her most hilarious lines didn’t get the attention it deserved.

Some Republicans are “even whispering they’re ready to throw in for Hillary over Trump because they can’t afford to see the status quo go,” John McCain’s 2008 running mate said. “Otherwise, they won’t be able to be slurping off the gravy train that’s been feeding them all these years. They don’t want that to end.”

Seriously?

Iowa, home to the first official contests for the major parties’ nominations, is the nation’s . Saluting its corn-flavored gravy train is a rite of passage for presidential candidates courting Iowa voters like the ones at the Ames rally Palin was addressing.

And Trump, like every presidential candidate other than the libertarian-tinged Republicans Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, supports the government-pampered ethanol industry.

On the same day that Palin made her boisterous return to the political spotlight — and just one week before his state’s caucuses — Gov. Terry Branstad proclaimed his opposition to Cruz. “I think it would be very damaging to our state” for Iowa’s other leading GOP contender besides Trump to become president, Branstad told reporters at the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit.

Trump also addressed the event, hosted by Iowa’s main ethanol trade group in Altoona.

“We are with you, folks, and we’ve been with you since day one,” The Donald said, after assuring the assembled leaders of Big Corn that he would leave the Renewable Fuel Standard intact.

The RFS is a government program that requires gasoline sold in the United States to beblended with ethanol. This mandate theoretically boosts U.S. energy independence, buffers gas prices from spikes, and helps our nation fight climate change.

But growing government-subsidized corn to power transportation makes no environmental sense. It increases the acreage dedicated to a single crop, destroying farmland for a harvest that feeds no one. It does nothing to improve the American diet at a time when millions of us are obese and badly nourished.

Then there’s the crop’s horrible water footprint: It takes 75 gallons of water and 50 acres of land to grow enough corn for a single gallon of ethanol. It takes another three gallons of water to convert that corn into fuel in a factory. And the agribusiness model for corn grown for fuel consumes vast quantities of fertilizers and pesticides, which poison local waterways.

Meeting the challenge of the climate crisis means that Americans must drive less and get more miles per gallon when we hit the road. Burning gasoline blended with 10 percent ethanol, as the mandate currently requires, shaves 3 percent off a vehicle’s fuel efficiency, according to the government’s own data. That wastes oil — as does growing the corn and hauling it to processing plants.

And at current prices for oil and corn, ethanol has become so expensive to produce that the numbers no longer add up, according to professor Scott Irwin and professor emeritus Darrel Good of the University of Illinois Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics.

In other words, if the government stopped forcing industry to purchase the fuel, ethanol demand would evaporate. But since Iowa happens to be one of only seven swing statesthat will probably decide the 2016 presidential election, this gravy train will surely keep chugging along for years to come.

So slurp, baby, slurp.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.com, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies, where this piece originated. 

Emily Schwartz Greco: So Trump would 'take their oil'?

Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign ad pledges to “take their oil.” That’s what President (gasp) Trump would do after having “quickly cut the head off the Islamic State,” says the deep-voiced narrator.

Along with political decapitation, there are many disturbing things in the Republican front-runner’s commercials besides these three words. But stop and ponder the questions they raise.

First, the U.S. government lacks state-owned oil companies, the requisite drilling equipment, and a fleet of tankers. How would Trump “take their oil”?

He’d get around this inconvenience wrought by America’s capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with “a ring” of U.S. troops.

“You ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies?” Trump crowed in Iowa in November. “They’ll rebuild that sucker, brand new — it’ll be beautiful.”

(Exxon and its competitors aren’t “great” companies. They’re destroying the planet and are dangerous for investors. But let’s stick with those three words.)

Second, much of the territory the Islamic State controls today lies in oil-poor Syria. If a businessman-turned-president is going to deal with all the hassles that making our nation’s fifth-largest corporation an official agent of foreign policy would entail, why operate there?

Further, Syria faces a crisis so severe that babies are starving and the locals are eating cats and dogs to stay alive. Taking their oil would sow more instability and create more refugees. Doesn’t Trump see how bad snatching oil from the Islamic State’s survivors right after it falls would look?

Whether it’s out of humanitarian concern or propelled by the optics, shouldn’t the immediate post-ISIS U.S. mobilization focus on delivering aid and relief rather than further impoverishing the carpet-bombed populace?

Furthermore, the diplomatic conflict now brewing between Iran and Saudi Arabia may spiral into a regional war. Shouldn’t the Pentagon get out of the way instead of forming a “ring” around invasive oil rigs?

Finally, Uncle Sam can’t take oil that doesn’t lie below federal land without stealing it. How would swiping a commodity that belongs to other people foster stability in the Middle East and dial back the threat of “radical Islamic extremism,” three other wordsTrump likes to chant?

He’s also repeatedly criticized the U.S. government for not “taking” Iraq’s oil during Washington’s occupation, which began 13 years ago amid related oily delusions.

“The bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis,” notably including their oil revenue, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrongly predicted in October 2003.

Ultimately, Washington squandered $60 billion on Iraq’s botched reconstruction. The U.S. government left the country in shambles, vulnerable to the Islamic State’s operatives, and ready to forge military ties with Iran.

Trump’s call for easy fixes and letting post-conflict oil pay the bills coincides with our country’s latest Middle Eastern milestone. The Gulf War officially began with the bombing of Baghdad on January 17, 1991. Happy 25th anniversary, everybody!

While shorter and cheaper than the second Iraq War, that misadventure set the stage for the failures that followed. It dragged on in other ways through years of harsh economic sanctions and intermittent bombing.

The conflict inflicted immeasurable misery upon the Iraqi people with relatively little inconvenience on our part. Since it ended, however, cancers and other chronic diseaseshave sickened and even killed some 200,000 Gulf War veterans.

Isn’t it time to stop pretending that Americans can quickly fix the Middle East’s problems and deluding ourselves about how the profits from taking their oil will pay the tab for our military intervention?

It sure would be nice if the GOP presidential debate moderators were to ask The Donald some of these questions.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.org, where this piece originated.

Roster of bloviators is too pale and male

Anna Quindlen relayed an eye-opening and hair-raising experience to her readers in 1990. “A newspaper editor said to me not long ago, with no hint of self-consciousness, ‘I’d love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman,’” the New York Times columnist wrote. “Not only was there a quota; there was a quota of one.”

A quarter of a century later, many newspapers still have far to go. On a recent slow news day, white men wrote every bylined commentary in the The Washington Post’s op-ed pages.

Even the most well-meaning white men can’t speak for the rest of us.

Granted,  The Post  regularly features the analyses of Eugene Robinson, an African-American man, and Fareed Zakaria, an immigrant born in India. It also runs Kathleen Parker and other white women. Several of the paper’s Metro and Business section columnists are people of color, including at least two black women.

But that pale and male lineup that caught my eye was no blip.

While The Post does distribute columns written by Esther Cepeda and Ruben Navarrette, it doesn’t publish work by either of them or any other people of Latin American descent in its own pages. Given that the 54 million Latinos living in the United States compose our largest minority, can’t Washington’s dominant news source find room for the opinions expressed by a single person from this community?

Detailed research on byline balance is clear if infrequent. A 2012 Op-Ed Project study found that male opinion-page writers still outnumber female writers four-to-one.

This leaves most op-ed sections more testosterone-laced than the subset of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers who cheer when he disses Megyn Kelly.

In addition to this quantity problem, there are quality concerns. The Op-Ed Project found that a disproportionate share of women’s commentaries address “pink” things such as gender, food, and family, versus economics, politics, national security, and other hard-news topics.

The mainstream media’s even more muffled when it comes to amplifying voices from communities of color. The last time the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did the bean-counting, whites wrote up to 94 percent of the opinion pieces that ran in the three most prominent newspapers.

And like The Washington Post, The New York Times still doesn’t publish a single Latino columnist.

How does OtherWords, the editorial service I run, measure up?

Some background: William A. Collins founded Minuteman Media in 1998 as a bulwark against the growing dominance of conservatives in the nation’s opinion pages. When this avuncular former Norwalk, Conn., mayor handed me the reins of his editorial service six years ago, most of the folks writing the commentaries we distributed were pale and male.

By 2012, women were writing a quarter of the pieces that this editorial service, by then renamed, got published in newspapers. That was better but not good enough. Today, partly because of my column, women pen half of our work.

Achieving gender equality makes our scrappy outfit stand out. But people of color wrote only 5 percent of our commentaries in the first half of this year, in line with the media’s overall lack of diversity.

Working within the confines of a shoestring budget, OtherWords brings under-exposed yet bold voices to the kitchen tables of the good people from Union, South Carolina to Gardena, California — and hundreds of towns in between. Now that we’re less male, can we get less pale? We can and we must.

Because byline inequality matters.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords (OtherWords.org),  a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Emily Schwartz Greco: Slow solons won't stop wind-energy growth

The gaggle of workers in Montana’s Carbon County hacking at the barely thawed ground in late December were on a mission: Secure Mud Springs Wind Ranch’s eligibility for a green-energy incentive.

Why were they racing to catch a tax credit in that sparsely inhabited land? Congress.

While ambling across its latest do-nothing finish line, lawmakers approved a bill that extended five-dozen tax breaks. The last-minute move retroactively restored the Production Tax Credit, the wind industry’s primary source for federal support, with a catch: Only projects underway by the year’s end would qualify.

When President  Obama signed the legislation on Dec.  19, Washington had officially extended the wind incentive for the 10th time since 1992 in the least helpful way possible.

In this industrial Cinderella fairytale, Washington fleetingly granted some wind entrepreneurs their wish. Flipping the switch on for two weeks barely gave Mud Springs crews enough time to cut the 1,500 feet of access road and do the turbine prep work required to meet Washington’s evolving definition of getting started, the Billings Gazette reported.

Yet extinguishing this tax credit won’t stop the wind business. Thanks mainly to the increasingly cheap power it generates, it’s flourishing.

Wind generates over 4.5 percent of the nation’s electricity today, enough to power 18 million homes. By 2020, this energy source’s share of the total power market could more than double to 10 percent. By 2030, wind may fuel one out of every five kilowatts consumed in America, the Obama administration predicts.

In contrast to the main federal tax credit supporting solar power and offshore wind, which gives people and companies a break based on the quantity of money they spend, the Production Tax Credit ties tax breaks for wind farm operators to how much power they generate. Uncle Sam issues a 2.3-cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour produced for 10 years once qualifying energy projects go live.

As you might expect, plenty of conservatives favor this arrangement because it rewards performance. With the wind energy credit dead once again, will the Republican-led Congress revive it for the 11th time in 2015?

That’s up in the air.

Lawmakers have rebuffed Obama’s efforts to make this energy incentive permanent. A bid to renew the tax credit failed by a slim margin earlier this year in the Senate. Votes fell largely along party lines, with some notable exceptions: Democrat Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, rejected it, while Republicans Mark Kirk, of Illinois, Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, and Susan Collins, of Maine, supported the measure.

Several Republicans who hail from America’s wind-belt states voted no, including Steve Daines of Montana.

Yet with the arrival of GOP rising stars like freshmen Joni Ernst, of Iowa, and Cory Gardner, of Colorado, who have supported an extension in the past, the industry hasn’t lost hope.

“We are optimistic that Congress will extend the tax credit this year,” said David Ward, the American Wind Energy Association’s spokesman.

Building wind farms takes about two years, so lapses like the one the industry now faces trigger delayed reactions. The pace of wind capacity growth will plunge to 6.5 percent in 2016 from a projected 16 percent this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Congress, not market forces, fuels this boom-and-bust cycle.

That 16 percent growth is a big deal in today’s electricity market. It represents nearly half of the more than 20 gigawatts of power being added in 2015 to the nation’s collective grid. Wind is currently the leading source of the national grid’s new capacity, sailing past natural gas.

Meanwhile, coal-fired power plant shutdowns will unplug 13 gigawatts.

The wind industry now employs more than 50,000 American workers. It’s reducing pollution that causes cancer, seeds climate chaos, and increases asthma. How can there be any debate over whether Congress should sustain this successful tax credit?

Maybe those Montana construction workers should come to Washington to talk sense to Senator Daines. When it comes to renewing the tax credit for wind energy, he’s blowing it.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org.

Eleanor Schwartz Greco: Inhofe and other capital weather wimps

 

Coming up next in Washington.

What’s wrong with Washington?

I’m not talking about goofy political antics, like James Inhofe’s latest bid to disprove climate change.

In case you missed it, the chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee gave a mind-numbing speech a few weeks ago in which he muttered about February’s “unseasonal” weather, ice ages, polar bears, and terrorism.

At the start of the Oklahoma Republican’s 22-minute ramble, he slipped a snowball from a Ziploc bag and tossed it from his Senate floor perch. Mashing together weather and climate, Inhofe said the Earth can’t possibly be getting any warmer if it still snows in our nation’s capital.

Even Fox News Radio taunted the nation’s most prominent climate denier about this stunt, quoting from one of his books and running the headline “James Inhofe: There Is No Global Warming Because God.”

Money, actually, powers this delusion. Fat contributions from oil, gas, coal, and utility companies explain why politicians like Inhofe are still ignoring the overwhelmingconsensus among scientists that makes addressing climate change a top priority.

What I don’t get is why the 6 million people who make their homes in the District of Columbia and its suburbs cower whenever winter does its thing. No lobby fuels that.

Entire school systems in the nation’s seventh-biggest metropolitan region may open late or close altogether because of botched snow forecasts followed by slushy streets. The Metro system slows down and trains can’t service all stations when rail lines ice over. Garbage piles up and accidents clog the roads when it snows.

After living here for nearly 20 years, I’m never surprised when temperatures dip below the freezing point between November and March. Or when snowflakes flutter from the sky. I realize that snowdrifts bury cars and skim the bottoms of stop signs once every five years or so.

That’s why the whimpers irk me as much as the area’s systemic failure to hack winter weather. On crowded elevators, I struggle not to blurt “This isn’t Florida: Bundle up or shut up” at complainers who won’t wear a hat, a scarf, gloves, or a good pair of boots.

If they would just stop whining, these folks might take advantage of the freedom cold bouts bestow upon you to sleep in, cradle a good book, or cook up a storm.

I live in Arlington, Va. It’s the nation’s most-educated county, but lately my second-grader and third-grader haven’t spent much time with their teachers. During the first week of March, the local authorities shut schools on a snowy Monday, whittling a three-day week to just two days of instruction.

You see, the school system had already canceled all Thursday and Friday classes to give the parents of kids in elementary school time to meet with teachers. When it snowed again, Arlington Public Schools locked us out, too.

My family made the most of winter’s final blast by heading to Davis, W.Va., for two days. We cross-country skied, slid down North America’s longest sled run, and stomped around in the sparkling snow.

Spring snuck into town before we returned.

The cherry blossoms will bloom soon. All that pink will cheer up Washington’s wimps for a while. Then they’ll start fretting about the summer heat.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.com, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Emily Schwartz Greco/William A. Collins: Solar getting brighter

OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

NORWALK, Conn.

With so many homeowners and businesses making greener energy choices, private utilities — along with big oil, gas, coal, and nuclear companies — see the writing on the wall.Unlike some other denizens of the fossil-fueled set, this gang isn’t beating oil wells into solar panels, retiring nuclear reactors, or embracing wind and geothermal power. Instead, these guys are trying to coax lawmakers into rigging the rules against increasingly competitive new energy alternatives.You see, the bulwarks of conventional energy are good at math. And the math is increasingly not in their favor.Solar panels are growing so affordable, accessible, and popular that sun-powered energy accounted for 74 percent of the nation’s new electric generation capacity in the first three months of this year. Wind power comprised another 20 percent, geothermal 1 percent, and natural gas plus other sources accounted for the final 5 percent.

Coal didn’t even register.

OK, so that first-quarter surge was kind of an anomaly because it included the inauguration of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the world’s largest solar-concentrating power plant. Through a vast array of seven-by-ten-foot mirrors located on federal land along the California-Nevada border, this remarkable site produces enough energy to power 140,000 homes. Another vast utility-scale project aptly called “Genesis Solar” ramped up too.

But the U.S. solar industry did install a record amount of new capacity in 2013. And once enough folks produce their own power on their rooftops and utility-scale clean energy becomes commonplace, demand for the juice generated by the dangerous and dirty oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries will fizzle.

Can you imagine the economy weaning itself off of fossil fuels by the middle of this century? That’s what Denmark has officially pledged to do.

Besides, we all need to visualize this possibility. Unless most of humanity transitions to a new way of life powered by climate solutions, global warming could ultimately render the Earth uninhabitable.

Can you guess who is trying to manipulate legislation to squeeze a few more years out of the dirty-energy status quo instead of helping make a requisite green transition happen?

The American Legislative Exchange Council — a secretive national network known as ALEC — is stalking state capitols for just this purpose. ALEC’s lobbyists push a broad conservative agenda in statehouses through templated bills they tweak for state lawmakers.

What are these bills calling for? In states like Arizona, Utah, and Oklahoma, there are efforts to essentially tax homeowners who lease solar panels. But mostly ALEC is aiming for something bigger: gutting individual state “renewable portfolio standards.”

Those wonky-sounding regulations require utilities to provide a certain percentage of power from renewable sources at some set point in the future.

Alternative-energy leader California, for example, has committed to drawing a third of its juice from climate-friendly sources by 2020.

And who’s paying for this dirty work?

Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the trade association for the 70 percent of the U.S. utility industry controlled by private companies, is behind it — according to the Center for Media and Democracy. It’s joined in this legislative attack by coal giant Peabody Energy, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Koch Industries and other big fossil-fueled interests.

It may be hard to believe, but so far, foes of systematically encouraging renewable energy growth are losing. Badly. Even in Kansas. That state’s GOP-controlled legislature refused to repeal its renewable energy standard a few months ago in a 63-60 vote.

All 13 state-targeted efforts to chip away at or kill renewable energy standards have failed so far this year. Not one state rolled back its standards in 2013 either.

Who could have guessed that renewable energy would be so hard to foil? Well, anyone who pays attention to all the jobs it generates.

The solar industry now employs at least 142,000 people in the United States. Solar workers outnumber coal miners in this country. In Texas, solar supports more jobs than ranching and California has more solar workers than actors. Wind jobs are growing fast too. They hit a total of 80,000 last year.

Sorry, ALEC. Even the reddest states can’t ignore this rising tide of green jobs.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn. This piece originated on  OtherWords.org.

Emily Schwartz Greco/William A. Collins: Good news for public is bad news for Wall St.

  NORWALK, Conn.

For the first time since 1997, the U.S. economy just added at least 200,000 jobs per month for six months running. GDP grew at a 4 percent annual clip between April and June. The percentage of Americans who describe the economy as “good” has climbed to the highest level of President  Obama’s presidency.

Who wouldn’t rejoice over these happy milestones on the bumpy road to a real recovery?

Wall Street. On July 31, within hours of the release of a bunch of sunny indicators, stocks sank more than they had on any day since early February. The decline wiped out all gains the S&P 500 stock index had racked up over the month.

Global instability contributed to the sharp drop, but so did investors’ fretting over indications that workers are finally getting higher wages and more benefits.

And why exactly does Wall Street tank on news portending economic gains for most Americans? Don’t people with extra money in their pockets boost the economy when they spend more freely? Isn’t it something worth celebrating?

Not in an economy that caters to the rich.

You see, there are practical implications of the chasm between rich and poor for the conduct of commerce. For several years, retailers have increasingly doted on the affluent, the most alluring segment of the $10 trillion consumer spending market.

Consider how U.S. households differ. The richest 20 percent of Americans now pocket more than half of the nation’s income. The typical income for this kind of family tops $150,000, triple the norm for all of us. Together, these “high-value customers” (to borrow a phrase from LuxuryDaily.com) account for about 40 percent of all U.S. spending.

And the cost of real luxury has gotten a divorce from reality. A quilted Chanel handbag can set you back $4,900. An ultra-thin Piaget Altiplano watch could siphon 95 grand from your wallet.

There’s still some money made from selling cheap stuff to the poor and working class. That’s why the four biggest U.S. retailers are big-box behemoths Wal-Mart, Costco, and Target, along with the Kroger supermarket chain. Even the very bottom of the food chain, the people whose households eke by on $30,000 or less a year, account for a stagnant yet sizable $1 trillion bare-bones consumption market.

For them, dollar stores can be a bigger draw than the big boxes. They’re in a bind and so are the companies relying on their purchases.

“Customers are under pressure,” Dollar Tree Chief Executive Bob Sasser told The Wall Street Journal. “Unfortunately, that’s one reason why the space continues to grow.”

In a telling sign of today’s increasingly unequal times, Dollar Tree is merging with Family Dollar Stores. The No. 2 and No. 3 companies in this cut-throat market want to team up to compete with their No. 1 competitor, Dollar General. Together, they’ll fend off bids by Wal-Mart and its ilk to gobble up some of their territory with new smaller-box establishments.

Clearly, times are tough for retailers opting to sell stuff to the rest of us. But they’ve got it figured out for the most part and Wall Street worships predictability.

Think of all the economic models and assumptions that would be shattered if the drive toward wealth concentration were to take a detour toward shared prosperity.

Of course, financial experts won’t say these things out loud. Instead, they’ll mutter about inflation and freak out over signs that labor markets are growing tighter. Are those really big concerns in light of this protracted war on consumers?

If you would like to know more about how and why the rich are getting so much richer while the poor become steadily poorer (and you enjoy very long reads), check out Thomas Piketty’s 700-page masterpiece. In his wildly successful book Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the French economist has finally organized and footnoted every lost battle in this tale of class warfare.

Winning the debate, of course, isn’t enough. Until more U.S. political and business leaders decide they’ve had enough, this nation will become less of a democracy governed by the people and more of a plutocracy ruled by the rich.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former  Connecticut state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn. This piece originated at OtherWords.org.