“Is” certainly does not equal “ought.” The market has not spoken. The senators do not have an intellectual case for agricultural rent-seeking and crony capitalism. The way forward, as Travis Fisher of the Cato Institute explains, is to abolish the mandate and let a free market determine the right (lower) amount of ethanol needed as an oxygenate.

Apologists for uneconomical, government-dependent energies (a federally mandated ethanol mandate in this case) must use the best arguments they can conjure up, especially any that might appear plausible to the short-attention-span reader. The half-truth can do this, with the truth part setting up the deception. Another ploy is the “is” as if it is “ought.”

Consider the letter published in the Wall Street Journal last month by five farm state senators [1], “The Market Has Spoken: E15 Is a Net Positive” (June 4, 2026).…

“Democrats and environmentalists are shifting their approach to climate change…. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines.”

– Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer, New York Times (below)

It was “all of the above” on the way up, and it is “all of the above” on the way down. Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer’s “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure” (New York Times, June 11, 2026) is worth revisiting to document the sea change that has occurred in the Democrat party away from climate alarmism and forced energy transformation.

“As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change,” the article begins.…

“The multi-decade failure of climate mitigation policies has naturally given way to adaptation, which is the free-market, government-free approach to climate policy.”

Richard Black, head of communications at Climate Analytics (Germany), is frustrated about adaptation rather than his preferred course of “drastic” cuts in CO2 (think societal upheaval). “It’s important to see the recent transatlantic aircon spat for what it was – a deliberate distraction,” he complains. Chalk up another messaging failure and more futility for the anti-CO2, anti-modern-living lobby. [1]

Rhetorical Dead Cat?

Black continues:

Important, because it will come again. At some point soon, the mercury will rise higher still and recently-set records will be broken – driven by man-made climate change.

And, desperate to avoid a proper conversation about climate change, contrarians will once more throw the rhetorical dead cat onto the table of overheated hospital wards, parched crops and buckling railways and blame ’the left,’ ‘greens,’ ‘woke regulations’ or ‘Old Europe’ for blocking use of air conditioners or, even more dramatically, forcing them to be ‘ripped out.’

The DOE move to prop up the nuclear big iron also prompts a recollection of the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Alternatively, “Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.” Some 20 years ago, facing a 30-year decline in the U.S. nuclear power business (no reactor ordered after 1974 got built), the George W. Bush administration threw $8 billion in 2005 dollars each to two, two-unit AP-1000 reactor projects.

The Trump administration and its Department of Energy have made Canada–who many Americans other than Donald Trump consider our closest ally and good friend–happy. Recently (June 23, 2026), DOE’s loan office (grandiosity renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing) announced a $17.5 billion dollar loan program to subsidize building five as yet unidentified, two-unit 1,000-MW, nuclear power plant stations.…