Corn, solder, and globalization

I am always amazed how much world affairs affect me personally, particularly when the guvmint—any guvmint—gets involved. Our guvmint decided to subsidize the production of ethanol by a good little chunk of change per gallon. They did this for our good, to help us become independent of foreign oil. Farmers have devoted a blue jillion acres to growing corn for the production of guvmint subsidized ethanol. Dairy farmers have to compete to buy corn for their cows at much higher prices. The upshot of this is that today I paid more than $5.00 for a gallon of milk. Seems like only yesterday that milk was a buck eighty-nine per gallon. How is this helping me? Milk now costs more than the oil from which the program is supposedly saving us. Think globalization is just for economists to worry about? Consider this… France is part of the European Union. France wants to help create a "green" world. One thing they figured they could do is eliminate the lead from solder, although there wasn’t a lot of lead in solder, and the solder worked. To achieve their lofty goals, France passed a new standard that requires lead-free solder, which they call RoHS. No matter, why should we care what the French require in their own country? Ah, but we export a lot of goods to France and those exports must meet French specifications, or they won’t let them in the country. But how much solder do we export to France, anyway, and what does it have to do with me? Well, we export aircraft to France, and those aircraft include electronic components which include circuits which include solder. That solder must meet French specs. Oops! Our manufacturers had to switch to RoHS, even though it required expensive new methods. Everything is now hunky-dory, right? Now hear this—that RoHS solder has a problem. Turns out that it grows "tin whiskers" which can short out electronic components. That is not good. So what do we do? The French will surely change their requirements, right? Let’s just sit back and watch. We’d love to publish your comments. Please click the comment tab at the top.