From Bjorn Lomborg, who understands the concept of opportunity costs:
Biofuels were initially championed by environmental campaigners as a silver bullet against global warming. They started to change their minds as a stream of research showed that biofuels from most food crops did not significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and in many cases, caused forests to be destroyed to grow more food, creating more net carbon-dioxide emissions than fossil fuels.
Some green activists supported mandates for biofuel, hoping they would pave the way for next-generation ethanol, which would use non-food plants. That has not happened.
Today, it is difficult to find a single environmentalist who still backs the policy. Even former U.S. Vice President and Nobel laureate Al Gore—who once boasted of casting the deciding vote for ethanol support—calls the policy "a mistake." He now admits that he supported it because he "had a certain fondness for the [corn] farmers in the state of Iowa"—who, not coincidentally, were crucial to his 2000 presidential bid.
It is refreshing that Gore has now changed his view in line with the evidence. But there is a wider lesson. A chorus of voices from the left and right argue against continued government support for biofuel. The problem, as Gore has put it, is that "it's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going."
Read the whole thing. Link via John Whitehead at Environmental Economics.
Interesting that Mr. Gore, probably unknowingly, echoes Ronald Reagan who quipped "there's nothing quite as immortal as a government program."