Guy Wheatley
The Texarkana Gazette
I sat looking across the highway in front of my house at a field of
grass that had been growing uncut since May or June. It was late September
or Early October. The air was cool and dry and a gentle breeze caused the
seedheads to wave gently back and forth. The afternoon sun was bright without
being hot, and illuminated large insects occasionally flitting from one
stalk to another. The sounds of birds, insects, and rustling weeds drifted
peacefully to me, along with the smell of hay and drying leaves.
As I bring that sleepy memory back from the mid-1980s, another thought
comes to mind. America uses close to 3 billion barrels of oil per year.
OK. I know that seems like a big jump, but just hang in there and I'll
explain.
The pastoral scene described above was a field that belonged to a farmer
in Southeast Arkansas. For as long as I can remember, it had been planted
in grain crops such as oats or wheat. Rice is a cash crop in that area,
but this particular field was too hilly for rice levies, so it got oats,
wheat, and occasionally soy beans.
The American farmer is a model of efficiency. With hybrid grains, modern
equipment, and chemicals, they were producing more grain, in the 1980s,
than we could even pretend we knew what to do with. As a result, the price
of grain crops plunged. It cost more to grow the stuff than they could
sell it for. They couldn't just change crops. A combine back then cost
upwards of $100,000. Changing from grain to another crop would have meant
replacing, or extensively modifying that equipment. They would have gone
bankrupt long before they finished retooling.
So, the government stepped in. It subsidized prices by buying up excess
grain at a guaranteed price. Now the government had a lot of grain that
it bought with your hard-earned tax dollars. The grain couldn't be sold.
If there had been any market for it, the government wouldn't have had to
buy it in the first place. Fortunately some bright policy maker came up
with a solution. Use more tax dollars to build or rent silos to store the
grain.
This cycle continued for several years, until another one of those
unusual flashes of inspiration struck a public servant. "It will be cheaper,"
he reasoned, "to pay the farmers BFORE they grow the grain. That way, we
save the cost of storing it." A new government program was born.
To prevent farmers from double dipping, by accepting payment to not
raise wheat, then raising oats and selling it to the government, farmers
were paid to leave fields fallow. In some cases they were paid to plant
specific wild grasses and leave the field untouched for several years.
Hence the field in front of my house.
It's too bad we can't get these guys producing something that we're
in short supply of. Say ... oil.
It turns out we can. We have the technology to do it. We've been making
ethanol and biodiesel out of grain products for years. Nothing needs to
be invented or discovered. Those with a vested interest in keeping things
the way they are, raise objections such as cost, production capacity, and
non-energy petroleum products. These are bogus objections that pointedly
ignore the hidden costs of foreign petroleum, recent developments in chemical
processing and the economy of scale when bio production starts. The cost
of petroleum will continue to go up while the cost of bio energy will decrease
as a fledgling industry learns from experience.
We still produce more than a billion barrels of oil per year domestically.
That is more than enough to help us through the transition to a new energy
source. Refineries can be converted into processing plants. We will still
need distributors. Mom and Pop gas stations won't notice any difference.
American oil companies will have to think outside of the box. Since
this is in the national interest, it's not unreasonable to expect some
government support. The good news is that all of the money would say here
in the United States. It would first go to the construction industry to
build processing plants, then later to plant workers.
Recent events merely highlight a gripe I've had for years. It burns
me that we have to make nice to some people just because they're sitting
on top of a lot of oil. I'm tired of people, whose economy is based on
our consumption of their product, treating us like dirt. I'm tired of American
dollars going to people who funnel it to terrorists. I resent subsidizing
the oil industry with military and political intervention, tax credits
and use of public lands.
If we buy fuel from American farmers, then every dollar we spend on
energy will go into the American economy instead of terrorists training
camps. Instead of subsidizing farmers to grow grass, we can put them to
work meeting our national energy needs. Instead of subsidizing oil companies
to mess up the landscape and send money and jobs to the Middle East, we
can jump start the infrastructure needed to process renewable crops into
products like biodiesel and ethanol putting tens or hundreds of thousands
of Americans to work in the process.
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