Regarding biodiesel, the other biofuel that was promoted by the 2007 EISA, the law of unintended consequences is iron. Basically, as a result of reinstating the US$ 1 per gallon blenders’ tax credit for biodiesel, countries that produce palm oil — mainly Malaysia and Indonesia, at the expense of rainforests — are licking their chops and expecting to export a lot of palm-oil-based biodiesel to the United States this year.

In short: our tax dollars will be helping to destroy the last redoubt of the orangutan.

but without the underlying international necessity of combating global warming, ending our “dependence on foreign oil” — all those myths that provide the big excuse, it wouldn’t have happened.

No, I think you are missing the point: the federal government (and several states) have been supporting the ethanol industry since the late 1970s. That gave lots of time for a powerful lobby to develop. Yes, for awhile environmental groups supported ethanol because they believed the claims that it yielded cleaner emissions and that its use as a substitute for gasoline reduced GHG emissions. Perhaps that swayed a handful of votes in Congress. But the driving force (of those not only interested in the farm-level benefits) has always been the idea that ethanol could free the United States of dependence on foreign oil and, even beyond that, reduce prices at the pump.

but the Department of Agriculture predicts that food prices will climb at a 3% to 4% rate in 2010

Do you mean 2013?

… but then it has become clear that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not causing global warming, so there is no reason for the mandate in any case.

I disagree with the first part of your sentence, but in any case the mandate is not really about fighting greenhouse-gas emissions, nor has it really ever been. To Bush’s USDA appointees (with whom I debated the topic) it was about price support for farmers, rural jobs, and — incredibly — about reducing prices at the pump in rural areas. (Any economist, had one been asked, would have put paid to that notion.) To this administration, which appointed the former Governor of Iowa to run the USDA, for cripes sake, it is about Midwest votes, price support for farmers (which is now necessary in order to keep farmland prices at their record hights), and rural jobs.