Smart bombs

One of the enduring myths about the presidential nominating process is that there is a constitutional right for voters to be involved. Political parties are private entities that have every right to pick nominees in whatever way they’d like. They could hold an auction, a foot race, or just pick names out of a hat, and it wouldn’t be any of your business if you didn’t belong.

Does the Elks Lodge allow Eagles to vote for its exalted ruler? No, but neither is $10 million in taxpayer money tapped to hold that election. That could be one source of the confusion. But the only reason we have a presidential primary in Washington state is that voters passed an initiative to crash the parties. In doing so, they gave tacit approval to use public funds.

Since then, however, the parties have successfully fought the open nature of the state’s primaries, and now voters have to sign a pledge of allegiance for their ballot to be counted. What’s more, votes cast Tuesday by Democrats will be meaningless. The party already began selecting its delegates in caucuses. On the Republican side, 51 percent of Tuesday’s results will count.

We can’t control the process, but we can control the funding. The best solution is to dump the primaries for good. In the meantime, feel free to join me in sitting this one out.

Political climate change. Imagine that you’ve switched from a traditional car to a hybrid, and the result is that you’re polluting even more. That’s how promoters of biofuels must feel now that two recent studies have concluded that many alternatives to petroleum produce more greenhouse gases.

This depressing news is featured in the new edition of the journal Science. It appears that if we factor in the entire process for producing many biofuels, such as ethanol, we begin with a “carbon debt.” That’s because the work involved in preparing cropland releases carbon into the atmosphere, and the crops themselves absorb less carbon than the plants and trees that were cleared away. It’s true that alternative fuels burn cleaner, but researchers found that it would take 93 years for corn ethanol to make up the carbon debt.

As a policy matter, this is devastating. Presidential candidates routinely genuflect to corn ethanol interests in the Iowa caucuses, and federal law mandates a huge upswing in biofuel use in the next four years. States have been busy, too. Washington state mandates that 2 percent of all gasoline sales include ethanol, that biodiesel make up 2 percent of diesel sales and that state vehicles switch over to biodiesel if possible.

Alternative fuels remain an option in reducing our dependence on foreign oil, but so does converting coal to liquid. Will political leaders merely ditch the environmental pitch or rethink the wisdom of biofuels?