The NYTimes, The Oil Patch’s Faithful Cheerleader Trashes Ethanol

Perhaps it was inevitable. The New York Times with its ‘rose tinted glasses’ reporting on the world oil industry, standing shoulder to shoulder together with Hugo Chavez ( please see post “Hugo Chavez Flirts With Hypocrisy and Ethanol” 04.23.07) and his well rehearsed sense of victimization, bashing “ethanol”, happy to undermine ethanol’s growing challenge to oils perfidious hegemony over our lives.
Hugo’s self interest is clear. Use more ethanol and you use less of his oil. The Times’ motivations are a little harder to fathom, forever mouthing oil industry pablums, absent any insightful nor questioning reporting on the acceleration of world oil oil prices other than oil patch handouts. Perhaps the corn growers and the Agricultural Cooperatives don’t have the massive advertising budgets that the oil companies do, or maybe it’s just a lack of market sophistication. But the bottom line is that for Hugo and the NYTimes it makes clear good sense, according to their reckoning, to pay $80 plus for a barrel of oil and get on with global warming. Corn at $3.85 a bushel is highway robbery. That it is fine to strangle economies and freeze households in winter with exorbitant fuel costs caused by manipulated oil prices (that’s what OPEC does, folks) so the that the good royals over in Saudi land can roll around in their Rolls Royces and fund madrassas throughout the world, or have Iran’s President Ahmadinejad play with his erector set building nuclear bombs. But the minute you make otherwise abundantly available food products a touch higher in price, so our farmers can buy a new John Deere, that becomes a grievous sin and a misallocation of economic resources. (As to the staggering disparity in feedstock prices-oil at $80/bbl plus, having risen 800% over the last decade with production costs significantly less than $20/bbl throughout the industry or in the case of Saudi Arabia less than $1.50 a barrel or a margin of over 6000% vs that of corn at $3.85/bushel on which our farmers are doing well if they have a 50% margin).

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