Today in Biofuels Opinion: “Do you really think oil is not subsidized?”

Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism: “Do you really think oil is not subsidized? Former CIA director James Woolsey estimates that U.S. oil companies receive preferential tax treatment worth more than $250 billion a year — and that doesn’t include the military costs necessary to keep oil supplies flowing around the world. We do that because oil is a strategic commodity: Western economies cannot function without it. That will be true until the day oil is forced to compete with a variety of alternative fuels.”

Robert Zubrin, In Defense of Biofuels: “In the last five years, despite the nearly threefold growth of the corn ethanol industry—actually, because of it—the amount of corn grown in the United States has vastly increased.

“The U.S. corn crop grew by 45 percent, the production of distillers grain (a high-value animal feed made from the protein saved from the corn used for ethanol) quadrupled, and the net U.S. corn production of food for humans and feed for animals increased 34 percent….At bottom, the entire food versus fuel argument boils down to a Malthusian conceit—that there is only so much that can be grown, so if we grow more of one thing, we must necessarily grow less of something else. But this is simply false. Agriculture is not a zero-sum game.”

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