Quote:
Originally Posted by Growler
It's all - it's always been - about maximizing profit. Period.
Got extra corn? There's no profit in feeding anyone with it, but if you can pour that corn out of a gas pump, you're golden. Being Green has nothing to do with it, other than the fact that the green movement is another profit-taking vehicle for industry - latch onto buzzwords, promote yourself and your product as green, and bingo - mo' money.
The green movement today is no different than was the lead-free fuel movement forty years ago: "This one is bad, this one is good, use this instead of this, and you'll be a good person" (while, sotto voce in the background, the company is saying, "And you'll pay a little more, but you'll feel good doing it, so we'll use that motivation to make a little more money.") It's been that way all along - the emergence of a green movement doesn't change the dynamic, it just reinforces it.
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I actually think it's more ideologically driven than that. Perhaps its a tad chicken/egg. Indeed, farmers have been a key lobbying force behind ethanol mandates. Of course, who wins when corn prices skyrocket? The farmers.
On the other hand, what I'm specifically referring to is the political backdrop of environmentalism behind the justification of the product in the first place. The ethanol lobby, which only really represents a TINY fraction of political forces, would have had no chance to succeed without an alliance from the more broad and subjective green movement.
So yes, while profit is certainly a motivation in the case of ethanol, I tend to believe that there would be zero chance of ethanol mandates without overwhelming environmentalist support. And when there are mandates, one almost automatically knows you have a free-market failure.