At the ends of the thousand miles or so between Monument Square in Troy and an Iowa cornfield, you can see the roots of two federal policies — one a success, the other a failure.
But before we get into the broad picture, I must offer a personal word of contrition: In the failure you'll read about here, I played a bit part. It was long ago.
You may not know that after harvest by a mechanical combine, a cornfield is reduced to a stubble of dried stalks weighing about four tons per acre. Soil scientists concluded years ago that about a ton of that cornstalk waste was needed to replenish soil nutrients used in the growing season. Wouldn't it be neat, those scientists said, if the other three tons of stalks could be salvaged and put to useful purpose?
As a young man working for a farm state congressman on the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, I was always looking for ways to depict my boss as a friend of farmers. So when a Purdue University chemical engineer suggested that a simple cellulose hydrolysis process could convert those cornstalks to alcohol, which could then be blended with gasoline in fuel, we ramped up the P.R. machine.
We set up "gasohol" hearings — the congressional version of kindergarten's show-and-tell. We got millions of dollars in federal funds for a laboratory to study the technology. We brought members of Congress from the East out to the Midwest to showcase the idea.
That stalk-to-fuel process never proved cost-effective — probably something having to do with picking up only three-quarters of those cornstalks. But our little shows were a part of what became a relentless campaign for ethanol fuel, soon touting corn as the raw stock.
The idea took off with the rise of the Iowa presidential caucuses. Every four years, one candidate after another from both parties, struggling to emerge from the pack in the first-in-the-nation Iowa balloting, vowed fealty to farmers by promising to support fuel made from corn.
Finally, in 2007, President George W. Bush signed a law requiring oil companies to add ethanol to gasoline. President Obama embraced the idea; he said corn-based fuels could slow global warming.
But while billions of gallons of ethanol are now blended with gasoline to fuel our cars, ethanol fuel has turned out to be terribly damaging to the environment, according to an Associated Press investigation published this week.
The rising price of corn — at $7 a bushel, more than double its price three summers ago — led farmers to plant on millions of acres of conservation land, turn pristine fields over to cultivation, fill in wetlands and pump tons of toxic nitrogen fertilizer.
"This is an ecological disaster," Craig Cox, of the Environmental Working Group, told AP.
And an economic one. Higher corn prices drive up foodbasket prices. When oil companies joined the demand for corn, it caused prices to rise for everything from soft drinks loaded with high fructose corn syrup to beef from corn-fed cattle.
So to get this off my chest: For my little role long ago in promoting alcohol fuels, as a know-it-all 20-something in a three-piece polyester-blend suit, I'm sorry.
Not that we're surprised to hear of government programs that turn the wrong way. We almost expect it. Yes, we're shocked by the scale of the disastrous roll-out of the Affordable Care Act — how is it possible that the Obama administration could so badly bungle its major domestic achievement? — but our expectations of competence in government aren't high anyway.
In September, Gallup reported that only 42 percent of Americans have even a fair amount of confidence that the federal government can handle domestic problems well — the lowest number in more than four decades.
Yes, but. In some places, only a competent hand with government support can help our neighbors and our communities.
On Monument Square in downtown Troy, a not-for-profit housing developer, The Community Builders Inc., has just finished an $18 million-plus renovation of what was built in the 19th century as the Hotel Troy. It's a grand seven-story brick building that had fallen into disrepair, risking the values of neighboring properties in the heart of a reviving little city.
Now 89 apartments provide badly needed affordable housing for elderly and disabled tenants. Part of the heat is geothermal, coming from more than a dozen drilled wells at the site, to keep utility bills low. A pretty little pocket park has been added.
And how did this eminently sensible and useful project happen? Funding came from both the federal government and the state of New York, in grants and tax credits. Community Builders does this sort of thing in 14 states; it has other projects in Schenectady, Cohoes and Albany. It's a positive example of your tax dollars at work.
I'd say it helps to balance out some of the fumbles made on taxpayers' behalf, often by well-intentioned folks like that young man who was pushing gasohol.