EDITORIAL: Next president should work to end ethanol mandate

When Al Gore and hard-core environmentalists are in full agreement with Big Oil, when climate change doomsayers are arm-in-arm with free-market economists, perhaps Republican and Democratic presidential candidates can come together to rid the United States of one of its most spectacular policy failures.

Because presidential candidates are regular visitors to Nevada, building support for the state's first-in-the-West caucuses in February, the Review-Journal is publishing a 10-editorial series of reforms we'd like them to champion. Republicans and Democrats are divided on a great many issues — hopelessly so on a number of them — but our eighth policy recommendation already has bipartisan support. The next president should push to eliminate the country's ethanol fuel mandate.

Republican President George W. Bush signed the country's renewable fuel standards into law in 2007, when the nation was over-dependent on imported oil and corn-based ethanol was seen as a way to simultaneously curb demand for gasoline and reduce carbon emissions.

But as with so many federal initiatives, there were unintended consequences. So many, in fact, that the ethanol mandate has accomplished precisely the opposite of its stated goals.

Because so much of the country's corn production is used to make ethanol, and not enough is available as food and livestock feed, demand for the crop has dramatically increased food prices. And because the country's fracking revolution has hugely increased domestic oil and gas production, ethanol now is more expensive to produce than gasoline. So the ethanol mandate has created higher fuel and food prices for American consumers. Thanks, Washington.

Did we mention that American taxpayers also subsidize both the farmers who grow corn and the ethanol producers? We're being quadruple-billed for a product we don't need and wouldn't buy if the government didn't force us.

As for the environmental benefits of ethanol, well, there aren't any. Farming has a much larger carbon footprint than drilling and requires huge amounts of water. Because ethanol can't be transported by pipeline, it must be brought to market by fuel-consuming trucks and trains. And studies have shown that ethanol burns dirtier and less efficiently than gasoline. That's why Mr. Gore and his climate change allies have called for an end to the ethanol mandate.

The writing is on the wall. The Environmental Protection Agency this week ordered 2016 ethanol production set 4.2 billion gallons below what the 2007 law initially required. That has corn farmers and ethanol producers squealing.

But that action doesn't go nearly far enough. The next president should work with Congress to kill the renewable fuel standard and end all ethanol subsidies.