Time & Perspective Quote by John Shimkus

Shimkus frames energy policy as a kind of national self-sabotage: America, he implies, has chosen boutique virtue (ethanol) over hard-nosed necessity (oil refining). The opening clause, "As we all know", is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a rhetorical shortcut that tries to convert a contested policy history into settled common sense, smoothing over the messy reasons refineries don’t get built: permitting battles, environmental regulation, local opposition, capital risk, and the industry’s own preference for expanding or upgrading existing plants rather than opening new ones.

The numbers are engineered for indignation. "Since 1976" evokes a long, almost accusatory stagnation, while "close to 100" sounds like an ethanol boom bordering on absurdity. The contrast sets up a moral accounting: we’ve been busy subsidizing the wrong thing. Ethanol, with its Midwestern political economy and farm-state loyalties, becomes a symbol of government distortion and feel-good energy independence theater. Oil refining, cast as the grown-up infrastructure choice, stands in for pragmatic abundance.

Context matters: this line lands in an era when gasoline prices and "energy independence" were potent talking points, and when critics of renewable fuel mandates used ethanol as shorthand for pork-barrel policy. Shimkus’s intent isn’t just to critique a fuel; it’s to indict a regulatory and cultural posture that, in his view, makes essential industrial projects impossible. The subtext: don’t blame markets or companies for high prices or supply constraints; blame policymakers who greenlit ethanol while allegedly kneecapping oil. It’s less a data point than a political weapon, built to make resentment feel like realism.