Seems like the barrier there is making the actual solar panels and not the raw amount of usable land, which the US effectively had an unlimited amount of?
It's not a serious proposal to cover Iowa in solar panels. It's a thought experiment to illustrate a) how dumb the ethanol mandate is, and b) how stupid the land-use objections to solar farms are.
The real hold up is permitting and transmission. Texas is able to build and deploy lots of solars. It is able to do much more than California (which subsidizes solar) because it has less regulatory bottlenecks.
Eventually you would hit material constraints but that problem is much further down the line of problems.
California is substantially ahead of Texas in the renewables as percentage of total demand (Texas has twice the demand -- air conditioning, etc). California is way ahead of Texas in using batteries to cover evening peaks.
Texas is doing great things in moving ahead and I suspect will eventually catch up with California, but California has had little problem in building renewables+batteries capacity. Unlike for housing. Why it succeeds on the one but not the other is an interesting question.
On solar, California is ahead of Texas significantly, without needing to bring in "renewables" and "percentage of total demand." In 2025, California produced 90,103 GWh to Texas's 64,073 from solar power.
The line has crossed in favor of Texas more recently in terms of total production which has allowed dimwits to go "stupid California can't build anything."
Like saying, the US produces more renewable electricity than Australia! U-S-A rules!
World annual PV panel production capacity is round 1.8TW, while annual installations are around 650GW. There's plenty of excess production capacity to build out that kind of transformation in a handful of years at most.
Fun fact - even if we did that and then did something dumb like use it all to capture carbon, make hydrogen, and turn those into synthetic gasoline? That's enough electricity to make enough gasoline to replace around 70% of American gasoline use. 10x more on an energy basis (since ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline) than corn ethanol manages, even if you completely ignore all the energy inputs into corn farming. Also, this would provide way more revenue for the landowners.
I realize this is not economically viable today because synthetic fuels are still too expensive, and that switching to EVs would be much better. But it illustrates how electricity at that scale opens up a *lot* of options.
How much of that production capacity is in China and effectively inaccessible from the US by tariffs though? I’m not sure how relevant the global numbers are when we don’t have a global single market.
It's true that almost all of it is in China, but 1) tariffs don't make that inaccessible to us, just more expensive (but still cheaper than US-made), and 2) those tariffs, like the ethanol policies, are a choice we (for some definition of "we") made, not one imposed on us by anyone. The Chinese would love to sell more to us, and we'd be richer for buying them.
Also, if we'd started in 2005, and actually been serious about it, the production capacity situation today could look very different.
If the math pencils out why don’t the Chinese do it? They have the solar panels already and are desperate enough to achieve energy independence to start massive solar subsidies in the first place.
Building off of AnthonyCV's point below, early on when the policy started, the country we were competing with on ethanol in a way was Brazil instead of China, but because their ethanol comes from tropical sugar cane instead of corn, it seemed to actually pencil out for them in a way that corn never was going to for us.
It doesn't pencil out. There are much better uses of all the resources involved, for both the US and China. It would still pencil out much better than what the US actually did.
China is, in fact, building and using a huge amount of solar, wind, EVs, and batteries. It would be stupid of them to waste energy and money doing the thing I wrote down in about a minute in response to another comment on an only slightly related topic.
Also, the PV production capacity *didn't* exist at this scale until very recently, and the capacity to usefully consume that much solar electricity still doesn't. There are a lot of engineering problems involved in changing that, that no one has solved yet at scale, because no one made and funded a good plan to do so in advance, even when a straight-lines-on-graphs extrapolation strongly suggested years or decades in advance that it was coming.
I hear a lot from friends and family in rural Ohio who are opposed to covering up all their farmland with solar panels (and also oppose data centers). Some of it is knee-jerk anti-solar/Republican stuff, but some of it comes down to "That will look ugly, and we're used to seeing corn and soy bean fields, which are pretty and peaceful, even when if they are mostly owned by large corporate farm operations."
But the people making the most NIMBY noises over this don't actually own farms (most of those cornfields are owned by big conglomerates who I guess would take the money). They just don't want to see anything but fields and forest. And some of them might have drank that koolaid when the frackers came calling, and didn't like the ROI or the contaminated well water. Allegedly.
Well sure, it's boring most of the time, but then the corn gets high and the leaves turn, and Widow Fortune names your oldest as the Harvest King, and your community gets to pick the annual sacrifice to the Corn God to keep the harvest bountiful and generating plenty of ethanol, and the outsiders start disappearing among the stalks -- No one wants to replace that with a sea of solar panels.
Maybe we should replace most of the corn with solar panels and a small portion to build an Aztec pyramid to occasionally sacrifice virgins to the Sun God?
For some reason, this reminded me that if we remove the corn we also have fewer corn mazes in the fall, and now I'm REALLY ambivalent about solar. Unless the solar installations can also be configured into mazes.
Well, just fewer corn mazes in Iowa? How prevalent is corn for biofuel on, say, the east coast. There will certainly be fewer crop circles because aliens aren't going to waste their time carving cryptic symbols into a couple acres.
It's their choice. I just don't want to waste tax dollars paying them to grow corn. They can grow timber. They can grow corn or wheat. They can build a Six Flags. It's their land.
I remembered (perhaps incorrectly) some large solar farms getting canceled in the San Luis Valley of Colorado due to some desert lizard or something, but when looking it up I found there's a new proposal for 600MW of solar going in there!
I think that would be a great policy. I don’t oppose it at all.
But rather than grant Matt credit for making a common sense point about energy, why not actually dig into his headline claim that corn prices matter for supermarket prices? Go take a look at inflation-adjusted Corn prices per-bushel. Adjusted for inflation, they’re basically flat over the past fifty years. Your corn-based products in the supermarket have gotten expensive wildly faster than inflation, by a factor of 3. That $7 bag of Doritos isn’t going to get measurably cheaper because you make some farm usage reform: the corn is already a tiny fraction of the price.
Great column. I wonder if there is a template for overturning concentrated producer subsidies (ethanol mandate, Jones Act, Sugar Program). America’s multiple-veto-point status quo bias makes it hard of course. Presumably if we were ever able to kill one, the tactics used might help with the others. Maybe the repeal of the crude oil export ban or the '96 farm bill have lessons.
Rent seeking is and has forever been common in human governance. Which is not to say we shouldn't reduce and fight it. It's a truly pernicious tax on prosperity and well-being. But if one One Weird Trick existed to deal with rent-seeking, we'd probably have found it by now. More likely, it's a never-ending battle, and the occasional victories occur when the subsidized party in question loses political clout (often over an agonizingly long period of time), or when some emergency enables a sufficiently powerful coalition to gut it.
I do sometimes get the impression we may be nudging closer to that blessed day when the Jones Act is finally (FINALLY!) repealed. I have no idea about using corn to make fuel.
Sure, and I am very much agreeing there is not One Weird Trick and the scoundrels must be beaten back every day! But I am saying this regular patrolling is NOT happening and we need to change the emphasis in what our electeds and their officials are doing. THE job that people need from them is to cut this BS out.
One thing I worry about is that we accumulate rent-seeking parasites on every part of our economy all the time, and they only really go away when technological or economic changes make them obsolete and sometimes not even then. I wonder what fraction of our production per year goes into feeding all those parasites. My guess is that we would be substantially richer and better off if we could be rid of them, but each individual parasite eats so little it's not worth the time and attention to kill if off individually. And so we have more expensive gas and shipping and milk and medicine and housing and cars and everything else, adding up to everyone just being a lot poorer, as the government engages in some gigantic scheme to take $100 from everyone and distribute $10 per person back via a thousand different programs and subsidies and mandates, each some different rent-seeking/special interest scheme that is impossible to get rid of because the beneficiaries care so much more than everyone else about it.
This I think is the best argument for automatically sunsetting laws after a certain number of years. It’s much easier to keep a stupid protectionism than to create one from scratch.
Eh, I don't agree with that sunsetting idea. Bills are hard enough to pass as is, should we really include a trap door that's going to trigger more fighting? If the ACA sunsetted, the GOP could've just slow walked the implementation of the law and ran out the clock knowing there would never be enough of a D majority to pass it again.
Seems like the unpopular part was the individual mandate which was effectively removed in Trump’s first term and turns out the system survived without it—so Democrats should’ve just been able to pass a version with no individual mandate?
Eh, the bill needed 60 votes to include the key plank of mandating health care enrollment for people with pre-existing conditions (it would not have passed the Byrd rule and was subject to filibuster). Remember zero Republicans supported the bill--the reason wasn't the individual mandate (as much as people might pretend this was some principled reason for opposition), it was because Republicans categorically do not want to increase taxes to spend more money on health care.
The idea of bringing back "pre-existing conditions" would sound almost cartoonishly evil to voters today, I don't know what the polling on this would look like but something around "all families much sacrifice one of their kids of Moloch" levels sounds about right.
There's a reason Republicans failed to repeal it despite trying so hard to do so for the better part of two decades.
Isn’t it possible that bills are so hard to pass because they are permanent? Congress would probably behave very differently if there was some automatic sunsetting provision.
Yep. Not to mention all of the pre-Internet laws being applied to the Internet leading to things like single moms being sued for millions of dollars for file sharing based on per-work statutory copyright damages or the recent billion-dollar judgment against an ISP that was overturned by the Supreme Court. If we had to pass the Copyright Act over again there is no way Congress would agree to these kinds of damages calculations.
The average voter couldn’t provide a passably accurate definition of “rent-seeking” if their life depended on it. Most voters possess little policy expertise. They’re utterly oblivious to the problem save in the odd case or two when their own privilege is at stake. And even then they almost never perceive it as a subsidy received by them and paid by others.
Even if there were no rent seeking and the motives of supporters were purely about making the world a better place, economic mandates always have the general effects that Matt laid out here.
We need a three pronged attack of messaging that is subliminal (YBBOL NROC EHT POTS), liminal (this article) and superliminal (Hey you, at the gas pump! They're forcing you to put ethanol in it!)
Iowa voters put McCain in 4th place. Corn farmers might be worth considering for a Republican candidate but much less relevant for a Democrat in either primaries or senate elections.
Matt, you and I are kismet on this subject. One I have been railing against for over a decade.
This is nothing more than transfer payments to Midwest farmers.
The amount of fertilizers that end up in the Mississippi creates a dead zone at the mouth of the river, which is said to be 1200 sq miles. It creates more carbon than it fixes. It ruins engines by creating water. It attracts water from condensation. As an environmental program, it gets an F.
Were it not for the Iowa Primary and others, this program would have been killed a long time ago. I like farmers just fine, but they can grow something else. We don’t need to put food in our gas tanks.
I think the problem is that ethanol is a problem 'before' combustion...it naturally absorbs water from the air so if it sits around along time the extra moisture corrodes tubing, tanks, etc.
This is one of those things that is possible in principle, but I am not aware of any systemic research that has demonstrated that it is a problem in the field.
Like, maybe don't leave an open bucket of E85 in a damp shed in Louisiana for three months, then gas up your car with it. But that's already a bad idea for a whole host of other, more practical reasons.
I've had two chain saw engines fail from leaving ethanol gas in them for too long. Also, you can't store gas in cans for very long anymore, 6 months max. There are workarounds, stabilizers, etc. but I'm still not a fan of the whole industry.
Ah, I should say I'm only talking about modern automotive (and probably marine/aviation) use. I'm not going to say all bets are off for small engines, but I'm not at all well-read on the topic.
The maintenance and repair impact of ethanol on modern cars with closed fuel-injection systems is relatively minor.
The consequences for small engines, classic cars, motorcycles, etc can be significant. I have several classic motorcycles and after carefully restoring the damaged carburetors and replacing all the damaged rubber fuel components, now follow a fastidious off-season storage procedure to keep it at bay, which includes making my own ethanol-free fuel to fill the tanks with when they sit (you can extract the ethanol from E10 by adding water until it falls out of solution, as ethanol is more water-soluble than gasoline-soluble, so it attaches to the water and both fall out of solution after reaching the saturation point).
I'm also careful winterizing my lawnmower and other small engines, as their fuel systems do not fare well when stored with ethanol-blend gas.
I hate having to air dry my engine every 3,000 miles. My buddy puts his right in the dryer but I hear that’s bad for the adhesives they use in modern engines.
I really think it’s strange how for a long period of time people in my life who never say a word about politics are frustrated by the price of food and no one says or does anything about it.
I’d like to know how much it would matter if we stopped doing ethanol stuff but it seems like this kind of thing should be a big deal.
I mean the price of coke has nearly doubled in six years. It may be mostly that but a lot of normal grocery items have had huge increases in cost. Yesterday people were talking up convenience foods as opposed to an insane door dash need claim. The price of frozen lunches has gone up a notable amount. Like the brands that have plant based options went from 4-7. The nominal costs of groceries really is a stress point for people and we’ve been taking steps to make it worse not better.
I have noticed a general $20 increase in the base weekly grocery bill. The prices going out to eat have gone up much more. I feel like I get more complaints about burritos and sandwiches now being 2x what they were precovid than groceries (barring beef cuts.)
"I should be able to buy a cheap sandwich in one of the most expensive metros made by some poor schlub who's living some place I don't really want to think about."
As frustrating as Matt's article already is, it leaves out the worst problem that this boondoggle creates in the corn belt, which is Nitrate pollution of surface and drinking water. This is from fertilizer for corn (not pesticides). Des Moines Water Works has the largest (and very costly) Nitrate removal system in the world to make the City's water safe to drink. A former Engineer from there who was later a water quality researcher at the University of Iowa is currently running a brave campaign for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture against this boondoggle (Chris Jones). Win or lose, he's great at hammering this issue and shining a light on it. If you're particularly annoyed by this boondoggle, I would donate to his campaign at http://chrisjonesforiowa.com
Yes I mentioned this elsewhere. But if we are going to give subsidies for corn midwest, farmers, why don't we give them subsidies to switch to regenerative farming instead
Not sure on recycling. The amount of N used on corn is immense though. And a lot of natural gas is used to produce it in the 1st place. Soybeans don't need it because legumes can "fix" N from the air, into the soil.
Does he advocate for a preset schedule for removal of the mandate blending volume to end in market outcomes? Kind of lean towards that to unwind the capital allocation distortion of the mandate being around for so long.
I assume that approach would be better for different actors who have fulfilled the current volume blend mandate. Allow marginal acres to come off slowly and over like 5 years, allow refineries/blending to plan allocation towards adjusting to hit established octane levels in their process and also wind down excess capacity in ethanol plants instead of doing everything all at once and relying on market signals.
Another thing this biofuel mandate does from an environmental perspective is delay electrification, which is the #1 solution to reduce CO2 emissions. Germany is about to scrap what is basically a "heat pump or district heating" mandate in buildings and to allow the installation of oil and gas heating in new buildings again, provided the oil and gas get blended with biofuels. A solution that's more expensive for households AND worse for the environment than a heat pump, but nevertheless gets pushed incredibly hard politically.
Germany's heavy listing to the left, (some say because they feel they need to be 'do-gooders' to make up for WWII) has resulted in some strange gyrations on their energy policy.
I obviously strongly agree with Matt on the merits. Corn farmers were an easy add to the Rent Seekers Tournament I ran on here on a March in the past. It really is as dumb as Matt says.
However...this issue always causes Matt to temporarily ignore his other hobbyhorse of being obsessed with winning the Senate. By Cook PVI, the 60th Senate seats for Democrats is a tie between Alaska, Texas, and...Iowa. It's no longer a swing state, but it's stil very inportant for crossing the filibuster line. I appreciate that Matt expects Josh Turek to "fight like a rabid dog on behalf of American biofuels interests". And I'm guessing he'd be fine with quietly let Iowa Democrats do this. But is this an issue that is salient enough with the public to put near the top of the agenda, at the risk of alienating Iowans?
Again, I personally am all for it, along with uniting the filibuster, because it's a dumb and bad policy, and I'd be more than willing to roll any political dice on it. But I've always noticed this change when I see Matt tweet about it.
He addresses this by observing that Iowa is no longer a swing state in terms of presidential elections, and by indicating its’s fine to give *Iowa* Democrats a free pass to support biofuels
But Matt *supports* drilling on the policy merits, because he feels, not unreasonably, that if we’re going to use fossil fuels, it’s better to use our own than to buy them from foreigners.
The synthesis is that, no matter how dumb biofuel support might be, the national messaging should be such that a voter or office holder in Iowa would not expect someone to get primaried out for supporting it.
That doesn't even mean biofuel must survive under federal Dem control! It just means an Iowa Dem shouldn't be punished for holding their constituents' line on the vote.
If the government is going to subsidize crops, it should be fruit and vegetables. (I'd be happy to focus subsidies on fruits and vegetables that can be grown regeneratively, whichever those are.)
The UK has transformed our farming subsidy system, payments are now focused on improving the environment rather than encouraging and discouraging production as was the case in the EU's CAP system.
It only matters if Iowa corn farmers are significant swing voters in Iowa Senate elections. While it is not optimal to isolate them I think the downside is pretty low, they are likely to be firm GOP voters
As a former Iowan, I think this is a reasonable worry. Corn is a big part of Iowa culture, even among people who don't farm or eat it often. I don't think it'd be hard to make "Hey this guy hates corn, don't vote for him!" into an effective ad
I was only there for college but I definitely agree. "He wants to build a data center over your corn fields" would be devastating and probably accurate.
They’re not, you see this driving around the country, what’s available at stations changes when you cross state lines. California passes all kinds of laws about emissions standards (I’m actually pretty sure we have to get our own special ethanol blend)
Yeah, California has its own rules about gas, so Iowa can, too. Though it probably will find it harder to convince manufacturers to go along with its requirements, since it's a much smaller market.
You'd think the good people of Iowa, and especially their leaders, would understand how vital it is for their state to be a swing state in the Electoral College so that both parties have reason to support the biofuel mandate. And the truth over the past 40 years is that Iowa has swung between periods of favoring Democrats and favoring Republicans (as well, in 2000 and 2004, of being a coin flip between the two). In the past three (Trump) elections, Iowa swung solidly in the Republican camp. If they continue that, and Democrats don't foolishly return to worshipping at the Iowa caucuses altar, then they face a real prospect that the Democrats once back in power will wave bye bye to the mandate.
Iowa is sort of like Israel here (let the comments erupt!) Historically, Israeli leaders have understood the necessity for keeping on good terms with both Republicans and Democrats and then Bibi threw that strategy in the trash can and the prospects have increased that Israel will reap what it has been sowing. I caution Iowa not to make the same mistake.
You noted that one reason our absolutely asinine ethanol policy was enacted and still in place is due to Iowa’s previous status as a swing state. I’m pretty sure the other reason corn policy in general is absurd was Iowa’s status as the first caucus state. In fact, this was a plot point during the last season of West Wing when Obama and McCain* had speeches in the primaries and Obama took the five on corn subsidies (while behind the scenes fighting against it as he knew it was policy wise defensible) and McCain wouldn’t take the dive*. Point being, if Iowa isn’t the first caucus state or swing state I would hope this would make it easier for President Ossoff (one can dream) to get rid of ethanol subsidies.
By the way there has to be a number of policies that are indefensible on the merits but were (and are) in place because a particular state was a swing state. I’m thinking Cuba policy and Florida. If Florida is a swing state now I would hope a President Ossoff would feel free to open relations. Perhaps this is why Marco Quisling Rubio is so gung ho to intervene in Venezuela and especially Cuba; this may be the last chance he has to enact some sort of personal revenge
Commentariat. Any other policies that fit the criteria above? Indefensible policies that only make sense politically because a particular state was a swing state and this no longer the case?
* I’m very aware the two characters running for president in the last season of West Wing are played by Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda. But it’s so so clear these characters are based on Obama and McCain. In fact, I’m pretty sure there are people who worked on the show who said Santos was based in part on Obama. Honestly kudos the writers for prescience.
Feel like sugar tariffs are a great example of the idea that lots of policies that are pretty indefensible and pure "rent seeking" in modern times were at one time at the very least defensible (even if not optimal policy). Like sugar tariffs go back to 1789 and were defensible if nothing else because of the idea of "hey its 1789, all the other better ways to generate revenue that exist today didn't exist yet".
Think basically this basically describes agricultural subsidies in general that go back to The Great Depression back when a quarter of Americans still lived on farms.
By the way. I think this an underrated problem with environmental policy. The impulse of "growth = bad" had more valence circa 1970 when rivers caught fire and there was a ring of smog engulfing American cities. Heck, one of the best arguments for why a lot of environmental laws were quite necessary is the movie Mary Poppins. An absolutely key component to the movie is the fact that the city of London circa 1900 was entirely engulfed by soot and pollution. In other words the "degrowth" mindset was way more defensible (again not necessarily optimal) in the 70s than it is today when "degrowth" leads to environmental orgs coming out against solar panel farms.
There's also an earlier plotline about VP Hoynes being anti ethanol and Bartlet pressuring him into breaking a tie in favor of subsidies while admitting he is right and it's just political. I had a false memory of it hurting him in Iowa, but it didn't--Hoynes won Iowa in the show (in his primary campaign where he ultimately lost to Bartlet).
The discourse around West Wing is so fascinating to me. It's come in for so much criticism over the past 10-20 years since it went off the air that actually I've come around to the idea that it's actually underrated now. For one, the criticism that some of its story lines are unrealistic as to the actual politics or how something would play out in real life is true...but sort of to me so what. It's a show on the air for seven years with 22 episodes a season. No kidding some of the storylines will end up with "eyeroll" from people like me*. And furthermore, I think Aaron Sorkin is probably the prime example people have in mind when people say "No, actually the President making some great speech is not actually going to the 'one weird trick' to solving some policy problem. In fact, it's often the opposite as issues that had Bipartisan support end up losing Bipartisan support if the President makes a big deal out of it in a speech or press conference". I actually get the criticism, because to this day there is way too much emphasis on if you just get the right messenger, you can convince tons of people to support any policy no matter how extreme. Which is just not true**.
Having said all that, I feel like it's underappreciated how much the show delves into the tough choices and less than savory political decisions that are made. An example I have in mind is a storyline where Sam Seaborne (Rob Lowe's character) convinces his old law school buddy to run for Congress. Except the WH find out that years earlier there was an accusation that when Sam's buddy was a DA there was racial bias in jury selection so WH decides they are not going to back the campaign. So Sam's friend is hung out to dry as he's already filed to run and resigned his job to do so and lays into Sam for betraying him. Like I feel like it's made pretty clear that Sam's friend is not some racist and that the WH is screwing this guy over over something pretty small bore. It's actually a pretty ruthless moment. The "West Wing"/"Sorkin" spin on this storyline is Sam is clearly very heartbroken over this development. But it's very clear the message is even in very good people have to make pretty ruthless decisions basically because "this is the life they chose".
I've noted before that I've worked on campaigns and my wife has actually worked for local government and in the senate meaning we have some inside baseball knowledge of how politics work. And we like to tell people if you take the show "Veep"*** and take the show "West Wing" and mush them together, that's reality. I love "Veep" and would recommend to anyone, but it really is too cynical about how politicians act and their motivations (though Trump and his cronies are an argument that Veep wasn't cynical and outlandish enough).
* The plotline where President Bartlett's daughter gets kidnapped and then he temporarily resigns because he's too biased is an absurd storyline in so many ways. I honestly think the writers saw the success of "24" and said "we need more of that" even though "West Wing" was a completely different type of show. If "West Wing" was basically this storyline throughout it's run I would definitely be in the camp of this show is way too unrealistic for me to take seriously and even like.
** Matt has been one of his biggest proponents of this and I think mostly too his credit. But I think lately he takes this too far with his Dems need to go completely right wing on anything "social" to win elections ever again. One, it's not actually true that every Dem "identity" politics position is unpopular or more unpopular than GOP. But two, I think he's actually giving short shrift to the fact that the right messenger can actually help convince a handful of swing voters to "trust" them on a particular issue (see Mamdani, see Obama).
*** If there is ultimate rosetta stone for where "West Wing" backlash comes from I think it's actually "Veep". Given Ianucci had been in the biting satire game well before "Veep" hard to say the show was a direct response to West Wing. But ultimately I think "Veep's" success as a show made West Wing look bad even if unintentionally.
Always was fond of this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5igKuNF1rI Especially as it gets trotted out every time there has been a debt ceiling fight since 2011. I actually think someone should send this to various GOP ideologues and Dems who want to emulate GOP hardliners and tell them "you know all that posturing about the debt ceiling your colleagues used to do was just that...posturing...right?"
This is another one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYBWX6Cdv5I. Because I feel like it's an amazing summation of the idea you need to take issue polling with a heaping grain of salt. Doesn't at all mean it's useless, but more you really really have to make sure you're not taking issue polling results at face value. I honestly think this scene helps us understand how the absurdity of DOGE was ever able to happen (as Matt astutely has written about).
Is the commodity price of corn the main contributor to rising grocery prices, or to grocery prices in general? My intuition is that decreasing the commodity price of corn would have a quite modest impact on the price of groceries. It seems like there are other better arguments for removing the biofuels mandate, but centering the argument on grocery prices is less than convincing. There are many problems in America and the price of corn is too high is just not one of them.
I’m just saying, an article claiming a longstanding policy commitment by MY now reframed as a solution to rising grocery prices now that that’s politically salient is just not convincing.
I agree it might not be convincing, but "Frame your concerns in terms of what is publicly salient" is a foundational Slow Boring practice. It's not convincing to someone who does the math, but the math most people are doing is "How little milk can I buy with this gas price?" I'm not totally convinced by that logic but it is MY consistent.
Yes, I think if you polled Americans and asked if the government should be subsidizing gasoline or corn chips and breakfast cereal the answer would certainly be gasoline.
The steel man case for grocery prices would be that some of that fuel corn could be grown as feed corn instead, which would lower inputs to beef costs (I believe drought removing grazing land for free range/grass fed cows is the primary driver of high beef prices).
You subsidize gasoline directly instead of deliberately making your gas shittier just to pay off yokels in flyover country. The big ass truck runs better without putting corn in its tank.
Hopefully - but I think that's a little different. Those farmers have essentially free water due to legacy rights for groundwater or the Colorado river, so they're going to grow whatever is worth the most. Maybe if beef is cheaper overall they'll switch to a different crop? But hard to imagine that crop is going to be significantly water intensive. They'll probably grow almonds or something.
Forty percent of arable land used for corn is a lot of land that could be used to grow other crops for the food system. It’s hard to believe it wouldn’t make a difference in grocery costs if you say doubled wheat yields.
How did he not even cover the fact that ethanol has less energy per mass than gasoline. So we are literally all paying more money to have shittier gas that we need to fill more often... Just so corn farmers make money
Great question! Frankly not sure how much it’d fully save us from the specific problem of rent seeking for special interest groups and to some extent think it’s unavoidable in democratic system. The bigger thing that I think it helps with is making the system more equal in terms of strength of representation. One should not have stronger representation because you happen to live in a swing state/district but currently reps from these places have extra power
Globally speaking, if biofuels really want their day in the sun not only do they need to show that innovation can make them decarbonization-positive and produce-positive (as in food security), they also have to be forest-positive.
Otherwise the expansion of biofuels into trucking, shipping and flying will exacerbate ecological and environmental harms as the economic pressure to convert forests into fuel steeply rises.
This isn’t just about an aesthetic preference for the planet — it’s also about maintaining natural pollination, water and air quality and a healthy water cycle for humans.
Converting all the land used just for the corn for just ethanol to solar panels would produce 3 times the electricity used in the US today.
Seems like the barrier there is making the actual solar panels and not the raw amount of usable land, which the US effectively had an unlimited amount of?
It's not a serious proposal to cover Iowa in solar panels. It's a thought experiment to illustrate a) how dumb the ethanol mandate is, and b) how stupid the land-use objections to solar farms are.
It’s also not a serious barrier. There’s significant excess solar panel production globally. I’m pretty sure we’d be allowed to buy all we need.
The real hold up is permitting and transmission. Texas is able to build and deploy lots of solars. It is able to do much more than California (which subsidizes solar) because it has less regulatory bottlenecks.
Eventually you would hit material constraints but that problem is much further down the line of problems.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
California is substantially ahead of Texas in the renewables as percentage of total demand (Texas has twice the demand -- air conditioning, etc). California is way ahead of Texas in using batteries to cover evening peaks.
Texas is doing great things in moving ahead and I suspect will eventually catch up with California, but California has had little problem in building renewables+batteries capacity. Unlike for housing. Why it succeeds on the one but not the other is an interesting question.
On solar, California is ahead of Texas significantly, without needing to bring in "renewables" and "percentage of total demand." In 2025, California produced 90,103 GWh to Texas's 64,073 from solar power.
https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/solar-and-wind-2026
The line has crossed in favor of Texas more recently in terms of total production which has allowed dimwits to go "stupid California can't build anything."
Like saying, the US produces more renewable electricity than Australia! U-S-A rules!
World annual PV panel production capacity is round 1.8TW, while annual installations are around 650GW. There's plenty of excess production capacity to build out that kind of transformation in a handful of years at most.
Fun fact - even if we did that and then did something dumb like use it all to capture carbon, make hydrogen, and turn those into synthetic gasoline? That's enough electricity to make enough gasoline to replace around 70% of American gasoline use. 10x more on an energy basis (since ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline) than corn ethanol manages, even if you completely ignore all the energy inputs into corn farming. Also, this would provide way more revenue for the landowners.
I realize this is not economically viable today because synthetic fuels are still too expensive, and that switching to EVs would be much better. But it illustrates how electricity at that scale opens up a *lot* of options.
How much of that production capacity is in China and effectively inaccessible from the US by tariffs though? I’m not sure how relevant the global numbers are when we don’t have a global single market.
It's true that almost all of it is in China, but 1) tariffs don't make that inaccessible to us, just more expensive (but still cheaper than US-made), and 2) those tariffs, like the ethanol policies, are a choice we (for some definition of "we") made, not one imposed on us by anyone. The Chinese would love to sell more to us, and we'd be richer for buying them.
Also, if we'd started in 2005, and actually been serious about it, the production capacity situation today could look very different.
If the math pencils out why don’t the Chinese do it? They have the solar panels already and are desperate enough to achieve energy independence to start massive solar subsidies in the first place.
I wish we were installing half the solar capacity China is.
Building off of AnthonyCV's point below, early on when the policy started, the country we were competing with on ethanol in a way was Brazil instead of China, but because their ethanol comes from tropical sugar cane instead of corn, it seemed to actually pencil out for them in a way that corn never was going to for us.
It doesn't pencil out. There are much better uses of all the resources involved, for both the US and China. It would still pencil out much better than what the US actually did.
China is, in fact, building and using a huge amount of solar, wind, EVs, and batteries. It would be stupid of them to waste energy and money doing the thing I wrote down in about a minute in response to another comment on an only slightly related topic.
Also, the PV production capacity *didn't* exist at this scale until very recently, and the capacity to usefully consume that much solar electricity still doesn't. There are a lot of engineering problems involved in changing that, that no one has solved yet at scale, because no one made and funded a good plan to do so in advance, even when a straight-lines-on-graphs extrapolation strongly suggested years or decades in advance that it was coming.
Also using the electricity, which is basically free for a few hours most days but not available later on.
That's true. It's weird that the anti-solar people focus on the land constraints though.
I hear a lot from friends and family in rural Ohio who are opposed to covering up all their farmland with solar panels (and also oppose data centers). Some of it is knee-jerk anti-solar/Republican stuff, but some of it comes down to "That will look ugly, and we're used to seeing corn and soy bean fields, which are pretty and peaceful, even when if they are mostly owned by large corporate farm operations."
"Solar panels are ugly and we love looking at fields of corn."
"Here's how much we'll pay you to let us put up solar panels."
"Okey dokey!"
But the people making the most NIMBY noises over this don't actually own farms (most of those cornfields are owned by big conglomerates who I guess would take the money). They just don't want to see anything but fields and forest. And some of them might have drank that koolaid when the frackers came calling, and didn't like the ROI or the contaminated well water. Allegedly.
And they somehow take offense at "flyover country"? Corn is boring.
Well sure, it's boring most of the time, but then the corn gets high and the leaves turn, and Widow Fortune names your oldest as the Harvest King, and your community gets to pick the annual sacrifice to the Corn God to keep the harvest bountiful and generating plenty of ethanol, and the outsiders start disappearing among the stalks -- No one wants to replace that with a sea of solar panels.
Maybe we should replace most of the corn with solar panels and a small portion to build an Aztec pyramid to occasionally sacrifice virgins to the Sun God?
For some reason, this reminded me that if we remove the corn we also have fewer corn mazes in the fall, and now I'm REALLY ambivalent about solar. Unless the solar installations can also be configured into mazes.
Well, just fewer corn mazes in Iowa? How prevalent is corn for biofuel on, say, the east coast. There will certainly be fewer crop circles because aliens aren't going to waste their time carving cryptic symbols into a couple acres.
I would much rather get primitive reform to allow interstate transmission of electricity and put those solar panels to the desert south west.
And instead, if you need to give corn farmers, subsidies give them subsidies to do regenerative farming instead
It just doesn't make sense to convert prime farmland into solar panels
I recommend the book, Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie.
I'd prefer to cover parking lots with solar panels and let the farmland return to grasslands and forests. Farmland is not scarce.
I'm not opposed to parking lot solar, or rooftop solar. But I don't think it's as economical.
I'm also not opposed to grasslands, but you would have to buy that land to take it out of service.
And if we are doing that we want to start with the least productive land not the most.
> I'm also not opposed to grasslands, but you would have to buy that land to take it out of service.
The federal government pays for exactly this.
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/conservation/conservation-reserve-program
Buy it? It's their land. They can keep it.
They are currently making a living on that land. If you want it to be grasslands instead of corn fields you are going to need to pay them for that.
It's their choice. I just don't want to waste tax dollars paying them to grow corn. They can grow timber. They can grow corn or wheat. They can build a Six Flags. It's their land.
I remembered (perhaps incorrectly) some large solar farms getting canceled in the San Luis Valley of Colorado due to some desert lizard or something, but when looking it up I found there's a new proposal for 600MW of solar going in there!
https://www.alamosacitizen.com/massive-solar-project-proposed-where-crops-once-grew/
We have some massive solar farms blocked by a tortoise here in CA. Those reptiles must be very politically connected…
My understanding is that reptilian overlords rule our government from a bunker underneath the Denver Airport, so this theory does check out!
They want nuclear instead of solar so that they can get ninja powers.
Good, the San Luis Valley could use investment. It's a beautiful area but isolated and kinda poor.
So ridiculous. Ralph Wiggum needs to be held to account for tricking people into this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgkHr9F1vw] Maybe we can tell the leprechaun to tell him to burn down the corn fields.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X9ktfzJOa4]
As, always never trust someone who graduated from Bovine University.
I think that would be a great policy. I don’t oppose it at all.
But rather than grant Matt credit for making a common sense point about energy, why not actually dig into his headline claim that corn prices matter for supermarket prices? Go take a look at inflation-adjusted Corn prices per-bushel. Adjusted for inflation, they’re basically flat over the past fifty years. Your corn-based products in the supermarket have gotten expensive wildly faster than inflation, by a factor of 3. That $7 bag of Doritos isn’t going to get measurably cheaper because you make some farm usage reform: the corn is already a tiny fraction of the price.
Intriguing, show the calculation
Great column. I wonder if there is a template for overturning concentrated producer subsidies (ethanol mandate, Jones Act, Sugar Program). America’s multiple-veto-point status quo bias makes it hard of course. Presumably if we were ever able to kill one, the tactics used might help with the others. Maybe the repeal of the crude oil export ban or the '96 farm bill have lessons.
Rent seeking is and has forever been common in human governance. Which is not to say we shouldn't reduce and fight it. It's a truly pernicious tax on prosperity and well-being. But if one One Weird Trick existed to deal with rent-seeking, we'd probably have found it by now. More likely, it's a never-ending battle, and the occasional victories occur when the subsidized party in question loses political clout (often over an agonizingly long period of time), or when some emergency enables a sufficiently powerful coalition to gut it.
I do sometimes get the impression we may be nudging closer to that blessed day when the Jones Act is finally (FINALLY!) repealed. I have no idea about using corn to make fuel.
Sure, and I am very much agreeing there is not One Weird Trick and the scoundrels must be beaten back every day! But I am saying this regular patrolling is NOT happening and we need to change the emphasis in what our electeds and their officials are doing. THE job that people need from them is to cut this BS out.
One thing I worry about is that we accumulate rent-seeking parasites on every part of our economy all the time, and they only really go away when technological or economic changes make them obsolete and sometimes not even then. I wonder what fraction of our production per year goes into feeding all those parasites. My guess is that we would be substantially richer and better off if we could be rid of them, but each individual parasite eats so little it's not worth the time and attention to kill if off individually. And so we have more expensive gas and shipping and milk and medicine and housing and cars and everything else, adding up to everyone just being a lot poorer, as the government engages in some gigantic scheme to take $100 from everyone and distribute $10 per person back via a thousand different programs and subsidies and mandates, each some different rent-seeking/special interest scheme that is impossible to get rid of because the beneficiaries care so much more than everyone else about it.
This I think is the best argument for automatically sunsetting laws after a certain number of years. It’s much easier to keep a stupid protectionism than to create one from scratch.
Eh, I don't agree with that sunsetting idea. Bills are hard enough to pass as is, should we really include a trap door that's going to trigger more fighting? If the ACA sunsetted, the GOP could've just slow walked the implementation of the law and ran out the clock knowing there would never be enough of a D majority to pass it again.
Seems like the unpopular part was the individual mandate which was effectively removed in Trump’s first term and turns out the system survived without it—so Democrats should’ve just been able to pass a version with no individual mandate?
Eh, the bill needed 60 votes to include the key plank of mandating health care enrollment for people with pre-existing conditions (it would not have passed the Byrd rule and was subject to filibuster). Remember zero Republicans supported the bill--the reason wasn't the individual mandate (as much as people might pretend this was some principled reason for opposition), it was because Republicans categorically do not want to increase taxes to spend more money on health care.
Also the "Obama" part of "Obamacare."
Maybe the Democrats should have offered a good law instead of the ACA.
The ACA is good, actually.
Incisive analysis, Ken.
We wouldn’t be discussing the ACA if it had broad public support.
The idea of bringing back "pre-existing conditions" would sound almost cartoonishly evil to voters today, I don't know what the polling on this would look like but something around "all families much sacrifice one of their kids of Moloch" levels sounds about right.
There's a reason Republicans failed to repeal it despite trying so hard to do so for the better part of two decades.
It does now that the part that made it financially viable got stripped out.
Check the polling.
Isn’t it possible that bills are so hard to pass because they are permanent? Congress would probably behave very differently if there was some automatic sunsetting provision.
Yep. Not to mention all of the pre-Internet laws being applied to the Internet leading to things like single moms being sued for millions of dollars for file sharing based on per-work statutory copyright damages or the recent billion-dollar judgment against an ISP that was overturned by the Supreme Court. If we had to pass the Copyright Act over again there is no way Congress would agree to these kinds of damages calculations.
Oh sure they would. IP owners are powerful.
Great. Trump and the Republican Congress get to vote on renewing Medicare, Social Security, etc.
The model might be the way military bases were closed, in large batches at once with an up or down vote.
That would be a much better use of the reconciliation process than the fouled up mess it is today.
Good idea
Excellent parallel. Thanks for mentioning.
I mean SO MANY laws are corrupt rent-seeking BS. It's appalling, and people should be more angry about it.
The average voter couldn’t provide a passably accurate definition of “rent-seeking” if their life depended on it. Most voters possess little policy expertise. They’re utterly oblivious to the problem save in the odd case or two when their own privilege is at stake. And even then they almost never perceive it as a subsidy received by them and paid by others.
Sure, I think the language to use with normies is "corrupt special interests."
But this comments section is a sophisticated part of town so I was using my College Words. :)
Fair.
Even if there were no rent seeking and the motives of supporters were purely about making the world a better place, economic mandates always have the general effects that Matt laid out here.
And this is not new. I read Mancur Olsen's book _The Rise and Decline of Nations_ as a teenager, and I am not a young man!
We need a three pronged attack of messaging that is subliminal (YBBOL NROC EHT POTS), liminal (this article) and superliminal (Hey you, at the gas pump! They're forcing you to put ethanol in it!)
I get the need to have a us merchant marine in case of war but preventing us from buying hulls from overseas is ridiculous now.
Just like how if Michigan wasn’t a swing state we’d have better auto industry policy, if Iowa wasn’t our first caucus we would have better ag policy.
Cruz won Iowa while campaigning against corn subsidies, I think they are a bit of a paper tiger.
McCain won a presidential nomination and he had a longstanding position against ethanol policy.
Plus the Democrats kicked Iowa off the front of the schedule anyway.
yeah okay I was probably wrong then. Kudos to Iowa voters I guess
Iowa voters put McCain in 4th place. Corn farmers might be worth considering for a Republican candidate but much less relevant for a Democrat in either primaries or senate elections.
My point was the Iowa caucuses actually aren't important and candidates can skip them.
Matt, you and I are kismet on this subject. One I have been railing against for over a decade.
This is nothing more than transfer payments to Midwest farmers.
The amount of fertilizers that end up in the Mississippi creates a dead zone at the mouth of the river, which is said to be 1200 sq miles. It creates more carbon than it fixes. It ruins engines by creating water. It attracts water from condensation. As an environmental program, it gets an F.
Were it not for the Iowa Primary and others, this program would have been killed a long time ago. I like farmers just fine, but they can grow something else. We don’t need to put food in our gas tanks.
> It ruins engines by creating water.
??? What do you think are the two main products of any hydrocarbon combustion?
I think the problem is that ethanol is a problem 'before' combustion...it naturally absorbs water from the air so if it sits around along time the extra moisture corrodes tubing, tanks, etc.
This is one of those things that is possible in principle, but I am not aware of any systemic research that has demonstrated that it is a problem in the field.
Like, maybe don't leave an open bucket of E85 in a damp shed in Louisiana for three months, then gas up your car with it. But that's already a bad idea for a whole host of other, more practical reasons.
I've had two chain saw engines fail from leaving ethanol gas in them for too long. Also, you can't store gas in cans for very long anymore, 6 months max. There are workarounds, stabilizers, etc. but I'm still not a fan of the whole industry.
Ah, I should say I'm only talking about modern automotive (and probably marine/aviation) use. I'm not going to say all bets are off for small engines, but I'm not at all well-read on the topic.
The maintenance and repair impact of ethanol on modern cars with closed fuel-injection systems is relatively minor.
The consequences for small engines, classic cars, motorcycles, etc can be significant. I have several classic motorcycles and after carefully restoring the damaged carburetors and replacing all the damaged rubber fuel components, now follow a fastidious off-season storage procedure to keep it at bay, which includes making my own ethanol-free fuel to fill the tanks with when they sit (you can extract the ethanol from E10 by adding water until it falls out of solution, as ethanol is more water-soluble than gasoline-soluble, so it attaches to the water and both fall out of solution after reaching the saturation point).
I'm also careful winterizing my lawnmower and other small engines, as their fuel systems do not fare well when stored with ethanol-blend gas.
What do you think water in your gas tank does? (Hint: It doesn’t make your car’s engine run better.)
I hate having to air dry my engine every 3,000 miles. My buddy puts his right in the dryer but I hear that’s bad for the adhesives they use in modern engines.
Ask Josh Barro how bad it is with European engines!!!1
I don't think that word means what you think it means https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kismet
I really think it’s strange how for a long period of time people in my life who never say a word about politics are frustrated by the price of food and no one says or does anything about it.
I’d like to know how much it would matter if we stopped doing ethanol stuff but it seems like this kind of thing should be a big deal.
Politics might have always been like this, but at the moment seem unable to do simple and easy fixes to obviously broken problems.
The price of prepared food really spiked relative to ten years ago.
I mean the price of coke has nearly doubled in six years. It may be mostly that but a lot of normal grocery items have had huge increases in cost. Yesterday people were talking up convenience foods as opposed to an insane door dash need claim. The price of frozen lunches has gone up a notable amount. Like the brands that have plant based options went from 4-7. The nominal costs of groceries really is a stress point for people and we’ve been taking steps to make it worse not better.
You got me for a second talking about the price of coke...
I guess that's why people switch to meth its cheaper...
If we just gutted the government regulations on Coke the price would plummet.
Plus we would all lose weight!!!
I have noticed a general $20 increase in the base weekly grocery bill. The prices going out to eat have gone up much more. I feel like I get more complaints about burritos and sandwiches now being 2x what they were precovid than groceries (barring beef cuts.)
Cheaper food or "living wages,” pick one.
“I should be able to afford a two bedroom apartment in one of the most expensive metros by making sandwiches.”
"I should be able to buy a cheap sandwich in one of the most expensive metros made by some poor schlub who's living some place I don't really want to think about."
People also get quite frustrated about the price of gasoline. If food
prices are your #1 priority you can look at optimizing or subsidizing staple grains but it’s a trade off if gas is above ~$2.50
As frustrating as Matt's article already is, it leaves out the worst problem that this boondoggle creates in the corn belt, which is Nitrate pollution of surface and drinking water. This is from fertilizer for corn (not pesticides). Des Moines Water Works has the largest (and very costly) Nitrate removal system in the world to make the City's water safe to drink. A former Engineer from there who was later a water quality researcher at the University of Iowa is currently running a brave campaign for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture against this boondoggle (Chris Jones). Win or lose, he's great at hammering this issue and shining a light on it. If you're particularly annoyed by this boondoggle, I would donate to his campaign at http://chrisjonesforiowa.com
Yes I mentioned this elsewhere. But if we are going to give subsidies for corn midwest, farmers, why don't we give them subsidies to switch to regenerative farming instead
Can't those nitrates be recycled into fertilizer again, thereby offsetting some of the filtration expense?
Not sure on recycling. The amount of N used on corn is immense though. And a lot of natural gas is used to produce it in the 1st place. Soybeans don't need it because legumes can "fix" N from the air, into the soil.
Does he advocate for a preset schedule for removal of the mandate blending volume to end in market outcomes? Kind of lean towards that to unwind the capital allocation distortion of the mandate being around for so long.
I assume that approach would be better for different actors who have fulfilled the current volume blend mandate. Allow marginal acres to come off slowly and over like 5 years, allow refineries/blending to plan allocation towards adjusting to hit established octane levels in their process and also wind down excess capacity in ethanol plants instead of doing everything all at once and relying on market signals.
Another thing this biofuel mandate does from an environmental perspective is delay electrification, which is the #1 solution to reduce CO2 emissions. Germany is about to scrap what is basically a "heat pump or district heating" mandate in buildings and to allow the installation of oil and gas heating in new buildings again, provided the oil and gas get blended with biofuels. A solution that's more expensive for households AND worse for the environment than a heat pump, but nevertheless gets pushed incredibly hard politically.
Germany's heavy listing to the left, (some say because they feel they need to be 'do-gooders' to make up for WWII) has resulted in some strange gyrations on their energy policy.
That biofuel thing is 100 percent conservative coded in Germany
It would also have helped if they hadn't decommissioned a bunch of perfectly-good nuclear plants.
Can't like this enough, inject that Iowa hate directly into my veins.
Are you from Minnesota?
No, I'm from the South... pretty sure my Dad lives in Iowa these days though. Also, corn subsidies can die in a fire.
I obviously strongly agree with Matt on the merits. Corn farmers were an easy add to the Rent Seekers Tournament I ran on here on a March in the past. It really is as dumb as Matt says.
However...this issue always causes Matt to temporarily ignore his other hobbyhorse of being obsessed with winning the Senate. By Cook PVI, the 60th Senate seats for Democrats is a tie between Alaska, Texas, and...Iowa. It's no longer a swing state, but it's stil very inportant for crossing the filibuster line. I appreciate that Matt expects Josh Turek to "fight like a rabid dog on behalf of American biofuels interests". And I'm guessing he'd be fine with quietly let Iowa Democrats do this. But is this an issue that is salient enough with the public to put near the top of the agenda, at the risk of alienating Iowans?
Again, I personally am all for it, along with uniting the filibuster, because it's a dumb and bad policy, and I'd be more than willing to roll any political dice on it. But I've always noticed this change when I see Matt tweet about it.
He addresses this by observing that Iowa is no longer a swing state in terms of presidential elections, and by indicating its’s fine to give *Iowa* Democrats a free pass to support biofuels
But he wants Turek to win (or Wahls I guess) so by his logic Democrats everywhere have to support biofuels.
Does the public *like* ethanol? “No more taxes to turn food into gas, cheaper food, cheaper energy” seems like a very good pitch?
Seems good to me too, which is why I'm asking about its salience.
Well said. And Matt says national Democrats should go easy on drilling in order to help Peltola and Talarico.
This seems a bit inconsistent?
But Matt *supports* drilling on the policy merits, because he feels, not unreasonably, that if we’re going to use fossil fuels, it’s better to use our own than to buy them from foreigners.
The synthesis is that, no matter how dumb biofuel support might be, the national messaging should be such that a voter or office holder in Iowa would not expect someone to get primaried out for supporting it.
That doesn't even mean biofuel must survive under federal Dem control! It just means an Iowa Dem shouldn't be punished for holding their constituents' line on the vote.
Matt's general view is that to win the Senate they would have to, I dunno, support biofuels.
Maybe someone hacked his post today.
I hear his strategy as come at them from both sides: Southern Republicans plus coastal Democrats.
Can't we give money to rhe farmers in a more efficient manner, that's not bad for the environment?
If the government is going to subsidize crops, it should be fruit and vegetables. (I'd be happy to focus subsidies on fruits and vegetables that can be grown regeneratively, whichever those are.)
Then that unleashes an eternal argument as to whether corn is a vegetable or not.
Beats an argument over whether or not ketchup is a vegetable, amirite?
Or that purple is a fruit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHbEa4z6GQs
we definitely should be eating more fruits and vegetables and less grains.
It sucks that I find grains so damn tasty.
same. When I can stick with a low carb diet the weight comes off. But the first couple of weeks are REALLY hard.
The UK has transformed our farming subsidy system, payments are now focused on improving the environment rather than encouraging and discouraging production as was the case in the EU's CAP system.
It only matters if Iowa corn farmers are significant swing voters in Iowa Senate elections. While it is not optimal to isolate them I think the downside is pretty low, they are likely to be firm GOP voters
Unless general Iowa swing voters empathize with their state's cash crop.
As a former Iowan, I think this is a reasonable worry. Corn is a big part of Iowa culture, even among people who don't farm or eat it often. I don't think it'd be hard to make "Hey this guy hates corn, don't vote for him!" into an effective ad
I was only there for college but I definitely agree. "He wants to build a data center over your corn fields" would be devastating and probably accurate.
I feel like I'm being identity thefted right now, fellow default-pfp-Sam
100% of Iowa pols should probably continue to be pro-ethanol. The rest of the country’s politicians shouldn’t have to be?
If the state of Iowa wants to require ethanol blends, I think it’s totally fine if they decide to do it?
I wonder if that is constitutional, I presume petrol standards are all federal.
A better form of federalism would allow it
They’re not, you see this driving around the country, what’s available at stations changes when you cross state lines. California passes all kinds of laws about emissions standards (I’m actually pretty sure we have to get our own special ethanol blend)
Yeah, California has its own rules about gas, so Iowa can, too. Though it probably will find it harder to convince manufacturers to go along with its requirements, since it's a much smaller market.
I think I missed that rent seekers tournament. Can I ask for a link to the bracket?
https://challonge.com/d5pde3br
Corn farmers actually got upset in the first round by noncompete clauses! But of course the NIMBY homeowners were going to win in the end.
You'd think the good people of Iowa, and especially their leaders, would understand how vital it is for their state to be a swing state in the Electoral College so that both parties have reason to support the biofuel mandate. And the truth over the past 40 years is that Iowa has swung between periods of favoring Democrats and favoring Republicans (as well, in 2000 and 2004, of being a coin flip between the two). In the past three (Trump) elections, Iowa swung solidly in the Republican camp. If they continue that, and Democrats don't foolishly return to worshipping at the Iowa caucuses altar, then they face a real prospect that the Democrats once back in power will wave bye bye to the mandate.
Iowa is sort of like Israel here (let the comments erupt!) Historically, Israeli leaders have understood the necessity for keeping on good terms with both Republicans and Democrats and then Bibi threw that strategy in the trash can and the prospects have increased that Israel will reap what it has been sowing. I caution Iowa not to make the same mistake.
I had not scrolled down to this before posting my own comment containing an identical analogy, so... great minds, I guess.
Strong upvote for that analogy.
You noted that one reason our absolutely asinine ethanol policy was enacted and still in place is due to Iowa’s previous status as a swing state. I’m pretty sure the other reason corn policy in general is absurd was Iowa’s status as the first caucus state. In fact, this was a plot point during the last season of West Wing when Obama and McCain* had speeches in the primaries and Obama took the five on corn subsidies (while behind the scenes fighting against it as he knew it was policy wise defensible) and McCain wouldn’t take the dive*. Point being, if Iowa isn’t the first caucus state or swing state I would hope this would make it easier for President Ossoff (one can dream) to get rid of ethanol subsidies.
By the way there has to be a number of policies that are indefensible on the merits but were (and are) in place because a particular state was a swing state. I’m thinking Cuba policy and Florida. If Florida is a swing state now I would hope a President Ossoff would feel free to open relations. Perhaps this is why Marco Quisling Rubio is so gung ho to intervene in Venezuela and especially Cuba; this may be the last chance he has to enact some sort of personal revenge
Commentariat. Any other policies that fit the criteria above? Indefensible policies that only make sense politically because a particular state was a swing state and this no longer the case?
* I’m very aware the two characters running for president in the last season of West Wing are played by Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda. But it’s so so clear these characters are based on Obama and McCain. In fact, I’m pretty sure there are people who worked on the show who said Santos was based in part on Obama. Honestly kudos the writers for prescience.
It's also because the family farmer has some weird mythical status in us politics.
Probably sugar tariffs and Louisiana.
Feel like sugar tariffs are a great example of the idea that lots of policies that are pretty indefensible and pure "rent seeking" in modern times were at one time at the very least defensible (even if not optimal policy). Like sugar tariffs go back to 1789 and were defensible if nothing else because of the idea of "hey its 1789, all the other better ways to generate revenue that exist today didn't exist yet".
Think basically this basically describes agricultural subsidies in general that go back to The Great Depression back when a quarter of Americans still lived on farms.
By the way. I think this an underrated problem with environmental policy. The impulse of "growth = bad" had more valence circa 1970 when rivers caught fire and there was a ring of smog engulfing American cities. Heck, one of the best arguments for why a lot of environmental laws were quite necessary is the movie Mary Poppins. An absolutely key component to the movie is the fact that the city of London circa 1900 was entirely engulfed by soot and pollution. In other words the "degrowth" mindset was way more defensible (again not necessarily optimal) in the 70s than it is today when "degrowth" leads to environmental orgs coming out against solar panel farms.
There's also an earlier plotline about VP Hoynes being anti ethanol and Bartlet pressuring him into breaking a tie in favor of subsidies while admitting he is right and it's just political. I had a false memory of it hurting him in Iowa, but it didn't--Hoynes won Iowa in the show (in his primary campaign where he ultimately lost to Bartlet).
The discourse around West Wing is so fascinating to me. It's come in for so much criticism over the past 10-20 years since it went off the air that actually I've come around to the idea that it's actually underrated now. For one, the criticism that some of its story lines are unrealistic as to the actual politics or how something would play out in real life is true...but sort of to me so what. It's a show on the air for seven years with 22 episodes a season. No kidding some of the storylines will end up with "eyeroll" from people like me*. And furthermore, I think Aaron Sorkin is probably the prime example people have in mind when people say "No, actually the President making some great speech is not actually going to the 'one weird trick' to solving some policy problem. In fact, it's often the opposite as issues that had Bipartisan support end up losing Bipartisan support if the President makes a big deal out of it in a speech or press conference". I actually get the criticism, because to this day there is way too much emphasis on if you just get the right messenger, you can convince tons of people to support any policy no matter how extreme. Which is just not true**.
Having said all that, I feel like it's underappreciated how much the show delves into the tough choices and less than savory political decisions that are made. An example I have in mind is a storyline where Sam Seaborne (Rob Lowe's character) convinces his old law school buddy to run for Congress. Except the WH find out that years earlier there was an accusation that when Sam's buddy was a DA there was racial bias in jury selection so WH decides they are not going to back the campaign. So Sam's friend is hung out to dry as he's already filed to run and resigned his job to do so and lays into Sam for betraying him. Like I feel like it's made pretty clear that Sam's friend is not some racist and that the WH is screwing this guy over over something pretty small bore. It's actually a pretty ruthless moment. The "West Wing"/"Sorkin" spin on this storyline is Sam is clearly very heartbroken over this development. But it's very clear the message is even in very good people have to make pretty ruthless decisions basically because "this is the life they chose".
I've noted before that I've worked on campaigns and my wife has actually worked for local government and in the senate meaning we have some inside baseball knowledge of how politics work. And we like to tell people if you take the show "Veep"*** and take the show "West Wing" and mush them together, that's reality. I love "Veep" and would recommend to anyone, but it really is too cynical about how politicians act and their motivations (though Trump and his cronies are an argument that Veep wasn't cynical and outlandish enough).
* The plotline where President Bartlett's daughter gets kidnapped and then he temporarily resigns because he's too biased is an absurd storyline in so many ways. I honestly think the writers saw the success of "24" and said "we need more of that" even though "West Wing" was a completely different type of show. If "West Wing" was basically this storyline throughout it's run I would definitely be in the camp of this show is way too unrealistic for me to take seriously and even like.
** Matt has been one of his biggest proponents of this and I think mostly too his credit. But I think lately he takes this too far with his Dems need to go completely right wing on anything "social" to win elections ever again. One, it's not actually true that every Dem "identity" politics position is unpopular or more unpopular than GOP. But two, I think he's actually giving short shrift to the fact that the right messenger can actually help convince a handful of swing voters to "trust" them on a particular issue (see Mamdani, see Obama).
*** If there is ultimate rosetta stone for where "West Wing" backlash comes from I think it's actually "Veep". Given Ianucci had been in the biting satire game well before "Veep" hard to say the show was a direct response to West Wing. But ultimately I think "Veep's" success as a show made West Wing look bad even if unintentionally.
Peak TV was probably the extended sequence in the West Wing devoted to explaining and promoting the Peters Projection for global maps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLqC3FNNOaI
Always was fond of this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5igKuNF1rI Especially as it gets trotted out every time there has been a debt ceiling fight since 2011. I actually think someone should send this to various GOP ideologues and Dems who want to emulate GOP hardliners and tell them "you know all that posturing about the debt ceiling your colleagues used to do was just that...posturing...right?"
This is another one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYBWX6Cdv5I. Because I feel like it's an amazing summation of the idea you need to take issue polling with a heaping grain of salt. Doesn't at all mean it's useless, but more you really really have to make sure you're not taking issue polling results at face value. I honestly think this scene helps us understand how the absurdity of DOGE was ever able to happen (as Matt astutely has written about).
"Raise the debt ceiling from $7 trillion to $8 trillion."
Ah, that's so cute.
Wait, I don't remember that at all and I have a pretty good memory for that show. Do you recall the episode?
https://westwing.fandom.com/wiki/20_Hours_in_L.A.
I am fine with the Cuba policy
> no reason the corn people can’t be rolled
Roll corn –> delicious tortillas and tamales
Roll corn people –> lower food and energy prices
We have to think about the Children of the Corn ... people.
Is the commodity price of corn the main contributor to rising grocery prices, or to grocery prices in general? My intuition is that decreasing the commodity price of corn would have a quite modest impact on the price of groceries. It seems like there are other better arguments for removing the biofuels mandate, but centering the argument on grocery prices is less than convincing. There are many problems in America and the price of corn is too high is just not one of them.
You're right, it would make very little difference - a couple of percentage points of the food component of groceries, at most.
It's still a couple of percent that American consumers shouldn't be paying.
I’m just saying, an article claiming a longstanding policy commitment by MY now reframed as a solution to rising grocery prices now that that’s politically salient is just not convincing.
I agree it might not be convincing, but "Frame your concerns in terms of what is publicly salient" is a foundational Slow Boring practice. It's not convincing to someone who does the math, but the math most people are doing is "How little milk can I buy with this gas price?" I'm not totally convinced by that logic but it is MY consistent.
Though corn bypyproducts are used throughout the food industry (corn syrup, corn oil, etc. so maybe a few more percentage points?).
Yes, I think if you polled Americans and asked if the government should be subsidizing gasoline or corn chips and breakfast cereal the answer would certainly be gasoline.
The steel man case for grocery prices would be that some of that fuel corn could be grown as feed corn instead, which would lower inputs to beef costs (I believe drought removing grazing land for free range/grass fed cows is the primary driver of high beef prices).
You subsidize gasoline directly instead of deliberately making your gas shittier just to pay off yokels in flyover country. The big ass truck runs better without putting corn in its tank.
Bad news about who the gas subsidies would go to (west Pennsylvania yokels, Texas yokels, Alaskan yokels)!
Higher quality gas from higher quality yokels...
That would enable land in the arid west to quit being used for high water consumption alfalfa as well.
Hopefully - but I think that's a little different. Those farmers have essentially free water due to legacy rights for groundwater or the Colorado river, so they're going to grow whatever is worth the most. Maybe if beef is cheaper overall they'll switch to a different crop? But hard to imagine that crop is going to be significantly water intensive. They'll probably grow almonds or something.
Forty percent of arable land used for corn is a lot of land that could be used to grow other crops for the food system. It’s hard to believe it wouldn’t make a difference in grocery costs if you say doubled wheat yields.
Corn might be 40% but ethanol is only <10% (30m out of 330-360m overall farmland).
How did he not even cover the fact that ethanol has less energy per mass than gasoline. So we are literally all paying more money to have shittier gas that we need to fill more often... Just so corn farmers make money
The more you read about how much political power is wielded by people in swing states the more clear it is we need to move to a parliamentary system
Even in a presidential system things would be better if there wasn't a Senate and Electoral College.
How would we measure whether the special interest rent seeking thing is less or more of a problem in parliamentary systems?
Great question! Frankly not sure how much it’d fully save us from the specific problem of rent seeking for special interest groups and to some extent think it’s unavoidable in democratic system. The bigger thing that I think it helps with is making the system more equal in terms of strength of representation. One should not have stronger representation because you happen to live in a swing state/district but currently reps from these places have extra power
Since the US is not going to switch to a parliamentary system, we clearly do not “need” to do so.
Globally speaking, if biofuels really want their day in the sun not only do they need to show that innovation can make them decarbonization-positive and produce-positive (as in food security), they also have to be forest-positive.
Otherwise the expansion of biofuels into trucking, shipping and flying will exacerbate ecological and environmental harms as the economic pressure to convert forests into fuel steeply rises.
This isn’t just about an aesthetic preference for the planet — it’s also about maintaining natural pollination, water and air quality and a healthy water cycle for humans.