Indeed, the boondoggle bill deserves a White House rejection for its almost $300 billion of farm programs that will be paid for by taxpayers and consumers. Farm bills, however, no matter how wasteful, have a way of surviving, and this legislation may be no exception, since it’s a case study of bipartisanship gone bad.

Besides the sugar provisions we’ve written about here and here, the biofuels programs’ grants and loan guarantees, plus moneys for R&D and “energy efficiency” projects, together with the extension of the tariff on imported ethanol, will continue to exacerbate the food vs. fuel program.

Corn futures at the Chicago Board of Trade surged as much as 4 percent on Tuesday, with an all-time high of $6.60-3/4 a bushel set by the July 2009 contract.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s weekly agriculture summary, the pace of planting is significantly slower this year:

Corn: Twenty-seven percent of the Nation’s corn crop was planted by week’s end, 18 and 32 points behind last year and the 5-year average, respectively. In the central Corn Belt, Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley, and central Great Plains, producers gained momentum and were able to plant 20 percent or more of their crop between rain showers, but remained well behind normal in most areas. Elsewhere, farmers planted at a slower pace, awaiting warm, dry conditions to resume fieldwork. Progress was the farthest behind normal from Missouri and Illinois northward.

If lower crop production occurs, higher prices could add to rising food costs.

And, of course, the increased use of corn for biofuels has exacerbated the rise.  As the USDA noted in a May 2008 report:

The data suggest that while U.S. corn used for ethanol production had only a small effect on global markets in the 1980s and 1990s, the increase in U.S. ethanol production over the past 5 years and the related significant changes in the structure of the U.S. corn market have had a more pronounced impact on the world’s supply and demand balance for total coarse grains recently. Importantly, since the United States is the world’s largest corn exporter, some of the higher prices resulting from increased U.S. demand has spilled over onto world markets.

A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.” 

In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing.  Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”

By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment.  Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit.  But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.

Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA).  Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds.  And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies.  So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one.  That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

But here’s another question: if cellulosic ethanol does take off, what impact would that have on the clichés we use?  Would we have to scrap the old saying about separating the wheat from the chaff, and instead talk about separating the chaff from the wheat?

Europe’s steel industry joined forces with a workers’ union on Monday to warn that European Union efforts to curb climate change could put tens of thousands of steel industry jobs at risk.

The EU aims to cut CO2 emissions by at least one fifth by 2020 from 1990 levels, but several energy intensive industries say the cost of curbing emissions will make them uncompetitive against rivals from outside the bloc.

Check out what CEI was saying — way back in 1996 — about the costs of global warming policies. And one of the major costs projected was – jobs. Also check out CEI’s global warming website for up-to-date information.

Earth Day was Tuesday, and NBC Universal has extended the celebration into “Earth Week.” Reprising its “Green Week” from last fall, NBC and its affiliates worked some sort of environmental message into all of its programming this week.

Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.

In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.

This is all also part of of GE’s must discussed “ecomagination” campaign, which so far seems mostly to have produced ever more imaginative ways of getting U.S. taxpayers to pay GE to manufacture technologies consumers don’t want.

The story doesn’t explore the role of ethanol subsidies in causing starvation, although it notes that “the diversion of some crops to produce biofuels” is contributing to rising food prices, and that “the increasing use of crops to produce biofuels has been criticized as contributing to food shortages.”

Finance ministers in the Third World are now calling for an end to ethanol subsidies. South Africa’s finance minister calls them “criminal.” India’s finance minister declared that “in a world where there is hunger and poverty, there is no policy justification for diverting food crops towards bio-fuels. Converting food into fuel is neither good policy for the poor nor for the environment.” Ethanol subsidies are terrible for the environment.