John Dale - Oct 04, 2024

The US Federal Government provided subsidies for farms producing corn for ethanol. As often as it is able, Washington creates a whale. Imagine the scene when a live whale washes up on the beach. Can you hear the local newscasters calling the story on the evening news? "A whale washed up on the beach this morning in..." For some reason, when a whale washes up on the beach, people of all faiths, dispositions, orientations, and colors gather around to get the animal back into the water where it belongs. As the analogy goes, operators in Washington DC are operating a sub that chases the whales on the beach periodically to get people to rally around their causes. One such cause is the so-called climate crisis.

The deep state operating under the surface in Washington DC has exaggerated aspects of a legitimate issue - the climate crisis - in order to create favorable market conditions for a line of products it hopes to monopolize with the help of the federal government. In particular, they have used tax dollars to invest in a faux marketing strategy for a new line of products ranging from environmental sensing and cleanup to the electric vehicle. Through the use of forceful government action to accumulate power, the deep state hopes to put itself in a position to capture all the profits from alternative fuels while making requirements to capture carbon dioxide from things like ethanol plants. There are real dangers and pitfalls to unfettered manufacturing, but are these exaggerations real, or is the government simply being puppeted?

"The federal government subsidizes the development of [Carbon Capture and Sequestration] technology largely through funding for the Department of Energy; it subsidizes the use of CCS through tax provisions that reduce the cost of capturing and storing CO2. From 2011 to 2023, lawmakers appropriated a total of $5.3 billion (in nominal dollars) for CCS research and related programs. In addition, outside the regular appropriation process, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5) provided $3.4 billion for CCS, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, P.L. 117-58), enacted in November 2021, provided $8.2 billion." (1)

I'll concede that our living environments are important, most importantly when they are up-stream from our water supplies. Don't pee and poop in the water up stream is a good philosophy. Buy the property up-stream so you can pee and poop in the water seems to be the prevailing real-world practice. This holds true for Spearfish Canyon, the Missouri River, Strawberry (Whitewood) Creek, and countless other watersheds. Other aspects of our living environment are important as well from the protection of wildlife to being conscious about the quality of our air. Sitting on the freeway driving from Gilbert, Arizona to Scottsdale, Arizona at 7:45am will make you sneeze. To be sure, your body is trying to tell you something.

These isolated anecdotal examples are manageable with localized control, but centralized control has been foist upon Americans who are expected to gather around the most recent government exacerbated beached whale, the climate change crisis. The Federal Government and whomever controls it have sounded the alarm on climate change, but it's probably more of a business plan marketing strategy and less of a cause for alarm. The electric car has been romanticized as investors ignore the obvious dangers of exposure to EM/EMF/ELF/RF radiation. Being first to market for large sea changes in our markets means an extra helping of profits of new products being sold. Noses are plugged. Terrible anti-human decisions are made. The public is left to pick-up the pieces again.

Alternative fuels like ethanol are only supposed to be a stop-gap, a bridge, and a means of transition to electric vehicles. As it turns out, though, the capacity of America's farmers to produce corn for ethanol was underestimated as farmers grow more corn. In addition, new discoveries of oil and disclosures of existing known discoveries revealed that fossil fuels are in plentiful supply globally, and may even renew on a timetable much shorter than anticipated. With incredible innovations from Toyota and Honda around the internal combustion engine, the future of electric vehicles is in serious doubt as the beached whale seems to be springing to life and kicking for the water.

So, the Federal Government launched a torpedo.

"[When in doubt, change the rules and move the goalposts.]" -- Federal government policy

California and other markets for ethanol put up a huge artificial barrier to entry for South Dakota's farmers who were already heavily invested in corn. With so much inertia already achieved by South Dakota (and other) farmers, the decision to limit access to ethanol markets was devastating to the existing business plans of ethanol producers. It was more like a federal government bushwhacking than a bait-and-switch, but both terms seem to apply to the situation created by federal and blue state level regulation.

California created the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), which only allows producers of fuel to sell in California - a huge market - if there is a carbon offset in the production of the fuel. In the case of ethanol in South Dakota, that means sequestering carbon dioxide in order to sell ethanol in California. That's why the pipeline became an issue. It wasn't that South Dakota farmers and Republicans are hell bent on trying to take land away. (2)

So, the pipeline idea was proposed to transport carbon dioxide - the thing that plants breathe - to North Dakota where it can be sequestered in order for South Dakota farmers to create some financial clearance to pay their loans, feed their families, and keep alive the American family farm heritage. For anyone in South Dakota who supports these farmers, the pipeline is a good idea on its face. Behind the scenes, though, as with most federal government operations there are triggers that can create unintended consequences. The government tends to create other beached whales in other communities to create a big ol' beached whale competition that never should have existed in the first place. Now, property rights advocates have been pitted against farmers, a perfect scenario for globalist deep state strategists who spend their beach time devising ways to keep us apart. Farmers have been lured into the ditch by another hair-brained federal program started by globalists organizations who want to erase our borders and our culture here in the US. Farmers need a way to get out of the ditch.

"... the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) was not part of the original push to produce ethanol; the initial focus was primarily on using ethanol as an oxygenate to improve gasoline combustion, but the LCFS emerged later as a policy designed to incentivize the production of lower-carbon transportation fuels, including ethanol, by creating a market for carbon credits based on a fuel's life-cycle emissions." (3) (4) (5)

The future of ethanol is also in question mostly from the optics. Think about it. When other countries are struggling to feed their populations, we grow food to burn in our cars. Meanwhile, innovative modifications to the internal combustion engine promise to increase efficiency markedly while the electric vehicle industry holds back its whale sized bait and switch. Consider what is likely to happen with electric vehicle sales strategies if their industry gets a stranglehold on US automobile transportation. You didn't think you, the average Joe citizen, would get one of the high performing super Tesla sports cars, did you? If you get one of the mass produced electric vehicles that comes out after the death of the fossil fuel industry, you'll be lucky to make it over the Rocky Mountains without hurling some of your luggage overboard to reduce the drag. The future of electric vehicles is the gutless wonder. Remember the Yugo? It was a bottom of the barrel car built for the masses, but was a miserable failure in the long run despite massive government support. Get ready for your electric Yugo, supporters of the electric vehicle movement. Meanwhile, elitist party leaders will be driving the roadster model. But first, they have to get rid of alternatives to electric vehicles to ensure they don't have to compete with the amazing fiery internal combustion engines of today's highly tuned gas powered automobiles.

The ethanol industry's viability notwithstanding, the federal government's leadership in fuel and transportation is likely to create uncertainty in whatever products might win in the market for automobiles going forward. It's an unfortunate consequence of binding the hidden hands of a true free market.

"The extent to which carbon capture and storage will be used in the future is highly uncertain. Its prospects depend on a variety of factors, including changes in the cost to capture CO2, the availability of pipeline networks and storage capacity for transporting and storing CO2, federal and state regulatory decisions, and the development of clean energy technologies that could affect the demand for CCS." (1)

After my Grandfather had died, my Grandmother once told me that the Farmers' Union coming westward was controlling the amount of profits that could be made by South Dakota Farmers. According to her, as more farms gave into the demands of this farm labor union, more traditional farming families folded under the thin margins and elitist practices of the "haves" against the "have nots." Over time, South Dakota farms became consolidated, and smaller and mid-sized operations run by families were being slow pressured out of existence while people herded into metropolitan areas.

My Grandmother was smart, experienced, had 12 children in Belle Fourche, SD. She was the thrifty daughter of Norwegian immigrants to western South Dakota. The were practical survivors. My Grandfather ran a scrap yard at the intersection of Highways 34 and 85 at the south end of Belle Fourche. Farmers from all around visited and traded with him and he became a hub for the distribution of information and goods. You wouldn't believe the barrels of worn-out ball bearings he stored in big 40 gallon barrels, some shaped like triangles. Her story is believable, and explains why farmers of South Dakota, desperate to get out from under a legion communist ideology of government market and supply controls of the means of production, would flock to the promise of alternative fuel production from the fertile-but-angry farm land of South Dakota.

"An effort was made by some members of the Farmer–Labor Party of the United States to merge the convention of the FLP with that of the Conference for Progressive Political Action, an attempt which was unsuccessful. This group also attempted to remove all national political parties from the convention call—the intended effect being to exclude the Workers (Communist) Party from participation. This effort failed as well." (6)

You can almost hear the struggle, the writhing, the slow constriction of the American family farm in South Dakota through the decades following independence. The American family farm was the source of US power through the 1800's. Farms and culture was far from the reach of enemies. They were distributed and difficult to dispense. In the peace and quiet, superior scholars arose from reading books in the quiet of the countryside as mechanized innovations clawed back their time and as mass production out paced the appetites of insects, weather events, and customers.

Now, on the precipice of final destruction, it becomes very difficult to root against the South Dakota corn farmer's need to get their product to the markets that, when you consider their actions and legislation, hate America's farmers. Farm production has been hobbled. Their financing and the market prices for goods has been manipulated and skimmed and degraded. Taxes have increased, inflation strikes their consumers. They've been through the ringer several times, and now in playing the federal government's alternative fuels shell game, farmers may have lost from the beginning to the sleight of hand of a shifty federal government. However, if farmers can get their product to market and somehow make a profit, what would they do with the money?

Unfortunately, a deep state political machine has decided to craft another weapon to attack South Dakota's farmers. Rather than frame the issue as an avenue to escape communistic market controls, the issue has been framed as an Eminent Domain issue, wherein South Dakota farmers and South Dakota residents have been pitted against one another on the issue of the pipeline. The pipeline would carry carbon dioxide to North Dakota for sequestration, allowing the ethanol farmers legal access to markets for their product. But it must cross a lot of private property to get to North Dakota.

The people with the land are being bombarded with information about the dangers of the pipeline. There are many unanswered questions about land use rights post installation of the pipeline. Some landowners are getting dollars signs in their eyes. It all adds up to entrenchment and lack of cohesion in South Dakota about what to do. Corn farmers are in the ditch.

Will the people pull them out?

1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59832
2. https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/basics-notes.pdf
3. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CA-LCFS-Incentivizing-Ethanol-Industry-GHG-Mitigation.pdf
4. https://www.leg.mn.gov/docs/2024/mandated/240180.pdf
5. https://ethanolrfa.org/ethanol-101/ethanol-timeline
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer%E2%80%93Labor_Party