Bipartisan support to end ethanol subsidies?

In today's political climate in the U.S., it's rare to find bipartisan support for anything, let alone an eminently sensible idea like ending subsidies for ethanol. (Not to be confused with cutting the cellulosic ethanol RFS requirement for 2011 by 97%, which is unfortunate but necessary given that we haven't actually figured out yet how to produce cellulosic ethanol economically at scale.) It will be interesting to see how the 42 ethanol state senators push back against this one, but it does seem that the shifting balance toward fiscal conservatism makes it both more likely that subsidies could expire and more difficult for them to be re-established once the do, as NRDC's Nathanael Greene points out in the NY Times article.

I'm not close enough to corn futures markets to know to what extent the expectation of lapsing subsidies is baked in, but I'll be very curious to see how world grain prices react if subsidies are allowed to expire. The discontinuity may give us a crude sort of counterfactual to help answer the persistent question of how much biofuels drive up food prices.

Via Michael Roberts, who's also cheering.

There are 42 farm senators

I know I've wanted to refer to this before, and couldn't find it, so I'm posting it now (and expect to link back to it soon and often). The question is how many farm (or if you prefer, ethanol) Senators are there? One answer is here:

As former Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas once explained to Texas oil baron T. Boone Pickens, “There are 21 farm states, and that’s 42 senators. Those senators want ethanol.” And the influence of those senators — 15 states now have ethanol production capacity of at least 200 million gallons per year —will be hard to overcome.

So 42 farm senators, at least 30 of whom have a sizable incentive to support the continuation of "the ethanol juggernaut." That is a formidable force to overcome.