We’ve written recently about some of our concerns regarding the hypocrisy as well as bad policy in the Energy Bill recently signed into law. Well, new scientific reports expose further reason to wonder if all those recent converts and true believers on Capitol Hill even bother to check empirical evidence before polling data. One day, Al Gore’s may burn in effigy for perpetrating a hoax – adding further to his carbon footprint.

Here’s the essence of the new information: carbon emissions from the conversion of existing landscapes to produce corn and other organic materials for biofuels production creates a net “carbon debt” that can take centuries to erase.

Previous research on the issue of biofuels and the effect on global warming have never “credited the carbon-dioxide emissions that arise when virgin forests, grasslands and the like are cleared to grow biofuel feedstocks.”

And, this information isn’t coming from Rush Limbaugh or another “right winger” with an ax to grind. One study is from Princeton University and the Woods Hole Research Center, and the second was conducted by the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy – hardly organizations known for their conservative predispositions.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “When the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline. In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol ‘pays back’ the carbon released by land-use change.”

The Minnesota-Nature Conservancy study found the “carbon debt” for producing corn ethanol such as the Energy Bill subsidizes and mandates will take 48-93 years to repay. Far worse, in regions of the world like Indonesia and Malaysia where rapid destruction of native ecosystems for production of palm oil for biofuels stock, the debt could last as long as 423 years.

Common sense leads one to conclude we are obligated to be good stewards of the environment. It would be nice, though, if good science were to guide good public policy. The new legislation increases the biofuels mandate in gasoline by 500% to 36 billion gallons. Only government can make matters worse while believing they’re on the side of the angels.

Congress, most of the media, and far too many ordinary folks have bought in to the cult worship of Al Gore and his partial truths and even blatant falsehoods. The new cult religion of global warming fear mongers may one day be exposed by the truth. Maybe then Kermit the Frog will lead them in a penitential chorus of “It’s not easy being green.”