GoodFuels

A 1,900% Return on Investment?

Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and co-founder of the Set America Free Coalition, visited E&E TV to discuss why he believes an open fuel standard is the most viable option for our future transportation fuel policy.  In fact, Americans are saving between 80 and 90 billion dollars per year after investing only $4 billion in ethanol production.  That’s money in US pockets, not foreign oil cartels.

Read the excerpt:

Monica Trauzzi: Final question here. You want people to have the ability to choose. Are they really going to be choosing ethanol with this PR blitz that we’ve seen recently? What do you make of this mess with corn ethanol and the amount of negative attention that it’s been getting?

Gal Luft: Corn ethanol is not the only ethanol, as we know, and ethanol is not the only alcohol. Now, with all the publicity about ethanol, let’s just remember one thing, you know, you may like the subsidies, you may not like the subsidies. We’re talking about four or five or $6 billion a year that are going to American farmers and other Americans. Merrill Lynch and others, including guests on your show, said that this is saving us about 15 percent that otherwise would have — the price of oil would have been about 15 percent higher if not for the biofuels program. Fifteen percent is about $80 or $90 billion a year that would have gone to the oil cartel. So we have $4 billion a year that is going to American farmers that is saving us $80 billion that otherwise would have gone to Hugo Chavez, to the Saudis, to the Iranians, God knows who. And I think it’s not a bad deal.