As the international food crisis makes its way onto America’s front pages, climate realists have watched in amazement the groundswell of finger-pointing at ethanol. In the last 30 days alone, over 3,000 news reports have discussed the biofuel’s connection to rising prices and grain shortages across the globe.

Yet, with all this overdue attention on the folly of turning food into fuel, Nobel Laureate Al Gore — who has advocated the expansion of biofuels for decades, and is himself invested in companies at the forefront of such technologies — has thus far escaped scrutiny.

Such convenient cloaking comes despite Gore actually promoting some of his ethanol-related investments — including Amyris Biotechnologies and AltraBiofuels — at a conference in Monterey, California, back in March.

Both World Bank President Robert Zoellick and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Domenique Strauss-Kahn warn that the increase in world food prices could force 100 million people back into absolute poverty (defined as a household income of $1 a day or less), wiping out all the gains the poorest billion people achieved during the past decade.

The price of wheat jumped 120 percent in the past year, hitting a 28-year high in February. The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year, hitting 19-year high. The price of corn tripled in the past two years, increasing from $2.00 a bushel in January 2006, to $3.05 in January 2007, to $4.25 in January 2008, and hitting $6 a bushel in April 2008.

Making matters worse, the venture capital group Gore joined in November, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, also has investments in Amyris and AltraBiofuels. One of the key partners of this firm, John Doerr, is advocating legislation that would expand biofuel usage at exactly the time when we should be rethinking this entire process.

Add it up, and you’ve got an astounding number of dollars invested in agritechnology companies by Gore and folks connected to him, who together possess extraordinary clout and access to Congress, and who are also willing to spend $300 million on a public-relations campaign to create (at least the impression of) a public movement for legislative action to “solve” anthropogenic global warming — all with the green media’s blessing.

Yet, as more and more attention is placed on the impact ethanol is having on food crops internationally, these same press members continue to ignore the former vice president’s business ties to biofuel. This was once again evident on May 6, when Gore appeared on Terry Gross’s National Public Radio show, “Fresh Air,” and the subject of ethanol and how it pertains to the current food crisis came up:

TERRY GROSS, NPR: Ethanol and the amount of farmland in the United States being devoted to growing corn for ethanol is now considered one of the major reasons for the global food crisis that we now have. Are there policies that you've watched being created that you think helped lead to the position that we're in with corn and ethanol?

AL GORE: Well, I think that corn ethanol is at best a transition strategy toward the new generation of biofuels that don't compete with food crops at all. There is a sophisticated debate about why the food price crisis has suddenly blown up in the world. The drought in Australia, connected to global warming in the view of many, took the largest grain flows out of the world markets, and that touched off some protectionist measures with countries hoarding grain. And the introduction of leverage or speculation in commodities has had a lot to do with it as well. But there's no doubt that, at least on the margins, the amounts of corn being used for ethanol have had some impact.

But there's a major debate on how to go about this in an environmentally and economically sensible way. And I think that's a useful debate. Most people come out, when they really look at all the facts, by saying, look, some of these fuels are bad and some of them are good. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's concentrate on developing the next generation that have positive consequences.

And that was it. From there, Gross quickly moved the discussion to Hurricane Katrina rather than pressing Gore about this issue. How is that possible?

After all, when Gore evaded the question “Are there policies that you've watched being created that you think helped lead to the position that we're in with corn and ethanol,” shouldn’t the NPR host have pointed out that it was Gore himself who cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate 14 years ago mandating the use of ethanol? For those that have forgotten, this was how the New York Times reported that inauspicious occasion on August 4, 1994 (emphasis added):

With a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Al Gore, the Senate upheld today an Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring that ethanol and other renewable fuels get a share of the gasoline additives market.

The Senate voted 51-50 to table an amendment that would have denied financing to the agency to carry out a rule guaranteeing renewable fuels a 15 percent share of the lucrative fuel oxygenate market in 1995. That share rises to 30 percent in following years. . . .

Tabling the amendment, offered by Democratic Senators Bennett J. Johnston of Louisiana and Bill Bradley of New Jersey, in effect kills it and clears the way for E.P.A. to carry out its program.

With this in mind, and given all the focus on the current international food crisis and how it relates to ethanol, shouldn’t this have been the subject of a follow-up question from Gross?

Wouldn’t this also have been an ideal time to bring up an April 25 request by Republican presidential nominee John McCain and 23 other senators for the EPA to halt the expansion of ethanol mandates? As reported by the Associated Press on May 5 (emphasis added):

Twenty-four Republican senators, including presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona, sent a letter Friday to the Environmental Protection Agency suggesting it waive, or restructure, rules that require a fivefold increase in ethanol production over the next 15 years.

Congress passed a law last year mandating a ramp-up to 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol by 2015 and 36 billion by 2022. But McCain and other Republicans said those rules should be suspended to put more corn back into the food supply for animal feed, and to encourage farmers to plant other crops.

Why didn’t Gross bring this up to the man who cast the tie-breaking vote 14 years ago to start such mandates? Mightn’t it also have represented a marvelous opportunity to discuss Gore’s own financial interest in this legislation, given his investments?

Or, how about asking Gore to address the fact that biofuels actually emit more carbon dioxide than conventional petroleum-based gasoline? As the Wall Street Journal summarized the scientific findings last week (emphasis added):

Now scientists are showing that ethanol will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions. A February report in the journal Science found that "corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . . Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%."

Wouldn’t this have been a great study to discuss with the Nobel Laureate, considering his position espoused to Congress on March 21, 2007, that global warming is “a planetary emergency, a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth” and his own support for ethanol as a policy means to address the purported GHG crisis?

Or, is it possible that NPR was told exactly what Gore would and wouldn’t discuss in this interview, and Gross was not allowed to toss the former Vice President anything but softballs?

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