The dumb policy making groceries more expensive
The article critiques the policy of blending ethanol into gasoline, arguing it unnecessarily raises grocery prices. It highlights the environmental downsides of biofuels and questions their effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The author suggests that stopping the requirement for ethanol blending could help alleviate food price pressures.
- ▪Ethanol blending in gasoline is argued to be an ineffective policy that raises grocery prices.
- ▪Biofuels are criticized for being an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with significant environmental downsides.
- ▪The requirement for ethanol blending was established due to lobbying from agricultural interests, but its political necessity is now questioned.
Slow Boring (Yglesias) files mainly under politics. We currently carry 34 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Slow Boring (Yglesias) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-dumb-policy-making-groceries |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 10:02:36 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T10:06:10.479Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T10:06:10.479Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | kKC04KKXcVYm |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The dumb policy making groceries more expensiveStop making people turn corn into gasolineMatthew YglesiasMay 21, 2026ShareFarm machines harvesting corn. (Photo by James Brey)When I was an intern in Chuck Schumer’s office 25 years ago, I tried to pitch my then-boss on including a line in a speech about how the legislation he was opposing was an effort to crucify mankind upon a cross of corn. The higher-ups, probably wisely, didn’t go for it. But while ethanol isn’t a subject I cover a lot, every time it comes up, I get kind of angry. And last week someone in marketing decided it would be a good idea to send me spam texts about the virtues of E15 and how we ought to legalize E15 year-round on a permanent basis.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Slow Boring (Yglesias).
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