Leadership Quote by Richard Lugar

Lugar’s line is policy-speak with a farm-belt grin: take what used to be “waste” and turn it into revenue. The intent is pragmatic persuasion, aimed at rural America and at lawmakers who like their energy arguments to come with a jobs program attached. Ethanol isn’t framed as a climate crusade or a techno-utopia; it’s pitched as a market opportunity that lets farmers monetize residue - corn stover, straw, husks - and feel like entrepreneurs rather than subsidized wards of the state.

The subtext is coalition-building. By calling agricultural waste a “cash crop,” Lugar collapses two political anxieties into one tidy solution: energy dependence and farm income volatility. You can almost hear the quiet promise to skeptical conservatives: this is not regulation; it’s growth. And to farm communities: you won’t be asked to sacrifice for national goals; you’ll be paid.

Context matters. Lugar’s career spanned the post-1970s energy shocks through the biofuels boom of the 2000s, when ethanol was sold as a domestic, renewable alternative that could be blended into gasoline at scale. The phrase “furthering the use of ethanol” signals incrementalism - an expansion of an existing system of mandates, tax incentives, and rural economic development.

What makes the line work is its rhetorical alchemy: it rebrands leftovers as assets and turns environmental tidiness into capitalist common sense. The blind spot is equally baked in. Calling it “waste” sidesteps land-use tradeoffs, soil health concerns, and the contested climate math of biofuels. It’s optimism engineered for a Senate floor: specific enough to sound real, flexible enough to avoid the hard accounting.