BobK

By now, pretty much everybody is staring to realize the folly of making ethanol from corn. Most obvious, of course, it the pressure that it puts on food prices, as crops are diverted from the dinner plate to gas tanks. As the public is starting to catch on, the ethanol pimps have a new pitch, that we should make biofuels from “something outside the food chain.”

Here’s the problem…. farmland is part of the food chain. Soil and water are part of the food chain. Fertilizer is part of the food chain. Farmers are part of the food chain. Simply changing from corn seeds to some other seed won’t take crops out of the food chain. Even if they developed a magic seed that grew into petroleum plants, it would still impact food prices, if that’s where farmers directed their efforts and resources. As long as farmland and farmers are producing more fuel and less food, then food will become more expensive compared to fuel.  It’s really as simple as that.

I suppose this was inevitable. Amtrak will start screening passengers’ carry-on bags. They’ll show up unannounced at boarding platforms with bomb-sniffing dogs and all sorts of other equipment. Lovely.

All this might be tolerable if we had a problem with terrorism on intercity trains. But I don’t think there’s ever been a serious terror incident on a long-distance train anywhere in the world. At least none come to mind. In North America, train riders have more to fear from beaver dams than from terrorists.

Which begs the question: Does Amtrak suddenly have some budget to spare? If they do, is this a good way to spend it? If not, then which government agency is paying for it?  In any case, I expect that as long as no terrorists try bringing bombs aboard trains, they’ll tell us it’s working.

Not only is this a waste of money, it’s a completely unnecessary intrusion.