Op-ed page offers two goodies...

I know, you can't believe one of them isn't Billy boy, can you? Today's NYT Op-ed page features Tommy Friedman on energy policy and Amartya Sen on food prices.

Friedman aims to send a message to the consumer and automobile manufacturer both via a permanent floor of $4 per gallon of gasoline (1/2 the Euro zone going rate, he adds pertinently)...

But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down. Therefore, if you buy a big gas guzzler today, you are locking yourself into perpetually high gasoline bills. You are buying a pig that will eat you out of house and home. At the same time, if you, a manufacturer, continue building fleets of nonhybrid gas guzzlers, you are condemning yourself, your employees and shareholders to oblivion.

What a cruel thing for a candidate to say? I disagree. Every decade we look back and say: “If only we had done the right thing then, we would be in a different position today.”

Sen also develops an interesting argument related to the food price increases and how they are related to the increase in consumption (demand) of the fast growing economy's winners, at the expense of those winners fellow citizens who are not winning in the global economy.

It is a tale of two peoples. In one version of the story, a country with a lot of poor people suddenly experiences fast economic expansion, but only half of the people share in the new prosperity. The favored ones spend a lot of their new income on food, and unless supply expands very quickly, prices shoot up. The rest of the poor now face higher food prices but no greater income, and begin to starve. Tragedies like this happen repeatedly in the world.

Of particular note, is the fact that energy policy collides with food policy in the fields of Iowa, where we continually use countless bushels of corn to fuel our gas guzzling hybrid SUV's while empty stomachs ache for some of that fuel...

In 2005, the United States Congress began to require widespread use of ethanol in motor fuels. This law combined with a subsidy for this use has created a flourishing corn market in the United States, but has also diverted agricultural resources from food to fuel. This makes it even harder for the hungry stomachs to compete.