This is just incredible – from Fox News online:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore reportedly has had a change of heart on ethanol, telling a conference on green energy in Europe that he only supported tax breaks for the alternative fuel to pander to farmers in his home state of Tennessee and the first-in-the-nation caucuses state of Iowa.

Speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank, Gore said the lobbyists have wrongly kept alive the program he once touted.

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Reuters quoted Gore saying of the U.S. policy that is about to come up for congressional review. “First-generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

No kidding. Everyone knew this. It’s just that the conservative who knew it are philistines, and the leftists who are now admitting it are thoughtful and flexible.

Oh, but it gets better.

“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa
because I was about to run for president,” the wire service reported Gore saying.

I didn’t know this, but now understand why my sodas are so expensive:

Ethanol production this year will reportedly consume 41 percent of the U.S. corn crop and 15 percent of the global corn crop. Last month, the Agriculture Department said corn crop production would fall this year and attributed the decline to the increase in the price of corn.

To be fair:

Reuters reported that Gore had less concern about second-generation ethanol production, which does not compete with food since it uses chemicals or enzymes to extract sugar from fiber in wood, waste or grass.

“I do think second and third generation that don’t compete with food prices will play an increasing role, certainly with aviation fuels,” Gore reportedly said.

Mark that under #too little too late.

And if you weren’t mad enough already, this will send you over the edge. Turns out that Al was not only responsible for inventing the internet, but he was directly responsible for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on ethanol:

The Media Research Center’s Noel Sheppard noted that as vice president, Gore was the tie-breaking vote in 1994 when the Senate voted to authorize ethanol production. Sheppard said that those who question Gore’s motives behind the climate change movement that landed the former vice president a Nobel prize and Oscar should also look to his comments on ethanol.

“So more than 10 years ago, Gore supported an expensive, ‘not good policy’ because he thought it would help him get elected president. Yet media don’t believe he’d misrepresent the threat of manmade global warming in order to become extremely rich,” Sheppard wrote Monday.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.