Donald Trump makes a corny argument for the 2024 nomination

The New Jersey Star-Ledger cites CEI Senior Fellow Ben Liberman on ethanol mandates:

Virtually every free-market thinker in every free-market think tank in America agrees on that point.

Typical is Ben Lieberman of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“The markets are always better than mandates,” Lieberman said when I phoned him. “Without a mandate, refiners would use as much ethanol as they need, which would probably be some level below what they now use.”

One of the arguments for the adoption of the ethanol mandate was that it would decrease carbon emissions and save fuel. But critics argue that production of ethanol uses about as much fossil fuel as is saved.

The problem with using corn for fuel is that it pushes up the price of food, Lieberman said. He noted that most biofuels are derived from food sources, corn for ethanol production and soybeans for biodiesel – another bureaucratic boondoggle.

“Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, corn prices were at multi-year highs,” he writes on his website. “And at this point, it seems that prices have nowhere to go but up now that Ukraine, one of the world’s major grain producers won’t have much of a crop this year.”

Read the full article here.