Corn Ethanol without Dramatically Increased Auto Fuel Efficiency Standards is a Deceptive Alternative!

In this morning's Diane Rehm show, Daniel Sperling--the Director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC-Davis--provided great insight into all that is wrong with any corn ethanol-based alternative fuel campaign that does not also emphasize dramatic increases in automobile fuel efficiency standards.

As Sperling clarified, current corn ethanol production in the US does not help the environment, since it yields global warming gasses equivalent to that produced by traditional oil-based fuels. While cellulose-based ethanol production could yield significant environmental benefits, this technology for producing ethanol will not become available for many years.

Current Flex-fuel vehicles on the US market yield only 20 mpg on average, while the best hybrids yield 50-70 mpg! Until the car industry wakes up and begins manufacturing flex-fuel vehicles that provide 40 mpg or more, they are selling bad products that are more expensive, continue to contribute to global warming, and yield little benefit to the environment.

On top of this, to sell 20 mpg flex-fuel vehicles as a "green" transportation alternative, is to treat consumers as fools. This is the equivalent to selling "natural" cigarettes as a "green" alternative to traditional cigarettes. It is a strategy for selling ignorance and deception to consumers in the name of environmental and energy consciousness.

The only currently-available strategy for producing significant reductions in the production of global warming gasses are those already available strategies that yield much more fuel-efficient automobiles. Hybrids are already yielding 60-70 mpg, and the technology for producing even regular gasoline cars like the GEO Metro that could achieve 45 mpg was already available in the 1990s. Why are there not more fuel-efficient cars like the GEO Metro on the market? Instead of producing more cars like this, the Chevy Metro was taken out of production several years ago.

What is the best action for the environment you can take if you are choosing an automobile? Auto consumers/users should refuse to buy or drive any car, whether it is flex-fuel or gasoline-powered, that does not yield at least 40 mpg--

This is the best way for any car buyer in the US to make a clear statement to car manufacturers and the oil industry, and begin to create an irresistable public demand for greatly improved fuel efficiency standards in the US car industry.

The choice to buy a flex-fuel car that continues to yield only 20 mpg is a fool's choice in support of continued inefficiency sustained by the powerful corn ethanol lobby in the US, which is not currently any better for the environment than the oil lobby.

Another False Choice Hyped as a "Progressive" Alternative for Ending Our Oil Addiction

As desperately as we need real policy alternatives, policy campaigns like the unfortunately shallow new KicktheOilHabit campaign just launched by the Center for American Progress are a sad distraction rather than a real benefit to the progressive political community struggling to advocate and build public demand for progressive policy alternatives that will benefit ALL Americans, rather than only the wealthy and slickly hip ones (who have perhaps newly invested in stocks for flex-fuel vehicles)--

In extreme disappointment at the shallowness of this campaign, and in the hope that it might be dramatically improved, here is the letter Satyagraha wrote to the Center for American Progress to protest the shallow policy alternative they are currently hyping. This letter was written in the belief that the Center for American Progress should be capable of developing a campaign that offers a more substantially progressive alternative for all Americans:

Dear Fellows at American Progess Action & the Center for American Progress,

Your newly launched "Kick the Oil Habit" Campaign is deeply disappointing! As currently constructed, it sounds like little more than an advertisement for the Flex-Fuel automobile industry, rather than anything approaching an alternative policy agenda....

I'm amazed and disturbed that your "Alternative" Plan to "make a difference in the lives of all Americans" completely ignores the one most important requirement of any plan for working-class, moderate-income Americans:

Raise automobile MPG fuel economy standards for all new cars, and make low-price 50+ mpg compact cars a priority for American car manufacturers!

All of your emphasis and the media's emphasis on Flex-fuel cars is cute and hip for upper-income people who can afford to pay for these more expensive flex-fuel vehicles. But your current so-called "alternative" strategy offers little to the many Americans who can barely afford to pay their current fuel bills, let alone buy new technology vehicles that are more expensive than regular cars, and provide no improvement on overall fuel economy (since ethanol provides fewer mpg than gasoline)--

So if you really want to develop a Policy Alternative for ALL Americans, you need to make a prominent demand for higher auto MPG standards (for both regular and flex-fuel cars) the center of your campaign. Without this, all this talk of ethanol and flexfuel yellowgreen cars is window-dressing that does more harm than good to work for policy alternatives by distracting attention from the most substantive policy issue of all: the need for all Americans to demand higher fuel efficiency.

We would now have much higher MPG standards if Congress had enacted legislation proposed a decade ago to require higher auto fuel efficiency standards. Instead, a total failure of legislation and policymaking in this country fostered the epidemic of SUVs, and drove our fuel economy standards backwards.

We will continue to fail to do the one thing that could achieve the most dramatic fuel savings if all the focus on alternative fuels keeps attention from being directed toward the need to demand dramatically higher fuel efficiency standards for all cars in the near term, making use of already available technologies. Without this, your supposed alternative plan is no different from the plan of the automobile advertisers for flex-fuel vehicles.... who hope to continue to have their cake while eating it too, at the expense of all working-class Americans--

Right now, your "Kick the Oil Habit" campaign offers no real alternative, and is in fact a rather sad joke on working-class Americans, since you are basically telling us the best alternative we have available to us is to buy new flex-fuel cars we can't afford to buy! This may be a good strategy to benefit the investor class that can afford to invest in the flex-fuel stock market, but for the rest of us who struggle to survive each day, and have nothing to invest in even our own futures, let alone in the stock market, this is a rather nasty and bitter joke to offer as a policy alternative for ALL Americans....

So would you please refocus your campaign on a demand to dramatically increase fuel-efficiency standards for all US-manufactured cars?! Even for the US car industry, this is an important policy demand, because if the US car industry does not become competitive with foreign-made cars in the fuel-efficiency department, there won't be much of a US car industry left in another 10 years, and THAT will also not benefit working-class Americans, especially in Michigan!

If you add an emphasis on fuel-efficiency standards to your Kick the Oil Habit campaign, I will be happy to publicize it on this Blog-- but as it now stands, your proposed policy "alternative" is a nobrainer that can only make those with brains feel insulted that you are offering it as an "alternative." Such a campaign may be good advertising for the flex-fuel auto market, but it doesn't go very deep to foster an alternative policy agenda....

So would you please be a bit more deeply creative, and offer a true progressive alternative?!! I would expect Fellows at the Center for American Progress to know and offer much better than this kind of shallow campaign to all Americans--

Democratic Hamiltonians?! Will Both Our Political Parties Continue to Play Working Americans for Fools?

Does Alexander Hamilton really offer the kind of policy solutions the Democratic party needs to address the terrible situation working Americans have been placed in by several decades of unfettered globalization?

According to the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, Alexander Hamilton is the icon of all good things....

As Satyagraha has previously written, however, Democrats concerned about the future of working Americans may seriously question whether Hamilton and Bob Rubin hold the Democratic policy key to our economic futures....

And we were glad to see that the Washington Post's editorial writer Harold Meyerson noted some of these same problems with the "Hamilton Project" in a column on April 19.

We also note that David Sirota, author of the new book Hostile Takeover: How Big Money & Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back, has also previously criticized the Hamilton Project for the way it betrays, rather than furthers, the real democratic project of creating a nation where all Americans can work together to prosper in a peaceful and sustainable world.

Cheers to David Sirota and Harold Meyerson for helping to point out the false policy direction in which the dominant leadership of the Democratic party would like to continue to take us.

And this is why, so long as democratic citizens allow the Democratic party to continue to be governed by this tired old policy elite, which is more beholden to the interests of globalization and the furtherance of their own wealth, than to the common good of the American people, there will continue to be so little difference between the alternatives offered by our two political parties.

If we want to fight the corruption and betrayal of the futures of all Americans represented by both our parties, it is time to choose not only new party representation, but new policy ideas, in November. But especially let's throw out the bums in the Democratic party who continue to offer the same kind of tired and limited policy alternatives as the Republicans.

As long as the policy ideas represented by the Democratic Party continue to offer no new vision of democratic possibility for the majority of working Americans, the great number of voters who could turn the political tide of this country in November will continue to question whether their vote for one or the other side of the Demopublicans will make any difference. And because Americans are not stupid, we should not expect a groundswell for change to develop on the side of a renewed Democratic party unless the Democrats can prove that they have a truly new Policy Vision to fight for this summer and beyond.

Without a new Policy Vision that addresses how the Democrats will deal more effectively with the terrible problems facing this country because of Global Warming, the disastrous foreign policy of the War in Iraq, and the ineffective strategies for dealing with the challenges of immigration, poverty, and health insurance in the US, we should expect many Americans to continue to doubt that either Party will serve them well. And, of course, this is the status quo the leadership of both parties would seem to prefer, since it will allow them to continue to take advantage of the American public and play us all for fools.

So long as doubt and apathy continue to divide and cloud the minds of the democratic majority who have the power to throw out this uninspired and narrowly self-interested political leadership, this tired and uninspired leadership will remain in power, and will continue to use its power to do what they have been doing for way too long now--selling low- and moderate-income hard-working Americans down the river--

We need a new Democratic Party with a true alternative Agenda that represents the interests and needs of all working Americans, rather than the interests and needs of the plutocrats who hope to keep control of both parties in the name of protecting the future of a version of globalization that will continue to make them rich on the backs of the working people of the US and the rest of the world.

Let's win our democracy and our policy back to the service of the working people of this country--by electing only those who will fight for us and our interests, rather than against us, even as they pretend to be "Democrats" but wear the policy clothing of the plutocrats they most truly represent.

So "Hear ye, Hear ye," oh Bob Rubin, and all who think an old Federalist like Hamilton is the best symbol for a Democratic economic policy for the twenty-first century--

We, the democratic people of the United States, can and must do better than this! But to do better for ourselves and each other collectively, we must create, together, a new Policy Vision and Agenda that will serve the interests of all Americans....

This is the work, and the challenge, we have ahead of us in the coming months. For if we cannot create a clear alternative agenda, and shape a new Democratic Party able to fight for such an agenda, it will make little difference which Party wins the elections in November....