Hillary's Olympic grade flip-flop on ethanol is complete

If you’re Hillary Clinton and you get it into your head to publish an editorial, you can have access to pretty much any newspaper or magazine in the country… if not the world. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times… they will all line up and happily splatter your ink across their pages, assuring you a platform to reach the nation. So there’s something of a minor mystery to be solved when the former First Lady decides to send in a missive to be printed in the internationally acclaimed Gazette. (Serving the farmers of eastern Iowa since 1883!)

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As you might have guessed by now, this must be a subject which she really doesn’t feel the rest of the nation should be perusing. And of course… it’s the Renewable Fuel Standard.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a successful history of partnering with farmers, rural small businesses, and rural co-ops in deploying renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions. These programs should be expanded. The United States should also continue supporting — and improving — the Renewable Fuel Standard and other federal incentives that have been a success for Iowa and much of rural America.

The Renewable Fuel Standard can continue to be a powerful tool to spur the development of advanced biofuels and expand the overall contribution that renewable fuels make to our national fuel supply. But we also can’t ignore significant changes to the energy landscape since the RFS was expanded in 2007. We have to get the RFS back on track in a way that provides investors with the certainty they need, protects consumers, improves access to E15, E85, and biodiesel blends, and effectively drives the development of cellulosic and other advanced biofuels.

Well, that’s about as full throated of an endorsement of the RFS and ethanol as you could find. She’s swinging for the fences and calling for increased ethanol blends, carefully supervised by Uncle Sam. But that wasn’t always her position. As we were recently reminded, Senator Clinton had a very different set of principles and, in fact, took a rather dim view of the entire subject.

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Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, penned an op-ed discussing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s convenient flip-flop on ethanol. Bryce points out that after voting against ethanol 17 times in the Senate, Hillary’s presidential aspirations made her quickly change her tune in 2007. An excerpt from the piece follows:

As Clinton and her allies said back in 2002, the corn ethanol requirements are an anti-consumer government mandate. Between 2007 and 2014, the cost premium for ethanol over an energy-equivalent amount of gasoline has averaged 92 cents per gallon. Total cost to consumers over that eight-year period: about $83 billion. And the ripoff continues. This year, the RFS will require motorists to purchase about 13 billion gallons of ethanol. (Federal legislators, including, notably, California’s Dianne Feinstein, have filed bills to repeal the RFS.)

She voted against ethanol seventeen times while in the Senate. A rather sensible view, really, but it went out the window when she first ran for president in 2007. Of course, it was all to no avail with Barack Obama standing in her way, but now that the boss is preparing to sail off into retirement it’s time to pander to King Corn again. And boy oh boy, she’s doing it in spades.

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Hillary Clinton will do or say anything she has to in her quest for the White House. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see a major news outlet point out this “evolution” of her views, to say nothing of the many other flip-flops she’s famously completed.

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Duane Patterson 11:00 AM | December 26, 2024
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