With gasoline prices at $3 per gallon, it is not surprising that people are pissed off. It is also not surprising that politicians - 2008 West Wing wannabes in particular - are scrambling for an "answer" that: a) requires no pain (e.g., raising the price of gasoline, increasing fuel economy standards sharply, cutting subsidies for "sprawl," imposing a "gas guzzler tax"); b) provides the APPEARANCE that they're actually doing something; c) panders to the voters and, of course, to the key caucus state of Iowa; and d) benefits their chief corporate contributors. Case in point: Hillary Clinton's call yesterday for a massive expansion of corn-based ethanol production in this country, as part of an effort to cut U.S. oil imports in half by 2025.
Let me be blunt about this. It's bonkers. It also may be good politics, however, if winning the Iowa caucuses is what you think about day and night. Like Hillary Clinton, in other words.
Why is ethanol so stupid, yet so smart at the same time?
Reason #1: Ethanol takes huge amounts of energy to produce. There have been various studies of corn-based ethanol. A July 2005 study by Cornell and Cal-Berkeley researchers, for example, indicated that it takes 29 percent MORE ENERGY to produce a gallon of ethanol than we get out of it. That's right, to produce a gallon of ethanol - mechanized growing of the corn, spraying it with petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, drying and cooking of the corn in energy-intensive ethanol plants - you use 1.29 gallons of oil under this study's assumptions. Let's say it again: it takes MORE THAN A GALLON OF OIL to produce a gallon of ethanol. D'oh!
Case closed? Well, not quite, because there are other, most "optimistic" studies - many of which have been funded by ethanol or corn-growing interests - that have indicated a small (10%? maybe 20%?) net energy gain from corn-based ethanol. Pretty lame, and those studies do not appear to count all the energy costs incurred in growing and processing the corn. Still, at least there's a tiny ray of hope that ethanol doesn't actually INCREASE our reliance on foreign oil, not DECREASE it as proponents will tell you. And there's also the prospect that technology will make ethanol production less energy-intensive. We'll see about that. But even if it does, there are still a lot of other, fatal problems with ethanol.
Reason #2: Corn-based ethanol costs a fortune to make. A column in yesterday's New York Times had the following to say on this issue:
Making ethanol from corn makes no more sense from an economic point of view. The federal government offers a tax break of 54 cents for every gallon of ethanol produced, and this incentive is what has generated the enthusiasm for ethanol refining: the spigot of public money is open and the pigs are rushing to the trough. (At the same time, the government protects domestic ethanol producers by imposing a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol.) According to the Wall Street Journal, it will cost U.S. taxpayers $120 for every barrel of oil saved by making ethanol. Some "savings."
Currently, oil prices are running around $70 per barrel. And we're talking about making ethanol - which, remember, takes huge amounts of expensive energy to produce - at $120 per barrel? It would be laughable if it weren't so screwed up.
Reason #3: Corn-based ethanol's an environmental disaster. You heard me right, an environmental disaster. Huh? Say what? You thought ethanol was supposed to be GOOD for the environment? Think again. As Michael Pollan points out:
"[with higher corn prices]...farmers will be tempted to produce yet more corn, which is not good news for the environment this whole deal is supposed to help. Why not? Because farmers will apply more nitrogen to boost yields (leading to more nitrogen pollution) and, since soy bean prices are down, they will be tempted to return to a +óGé¼+ôcorn-on-corn+óGé¼-¥ rotation. That is, rather than rotate their corn crops with soy beans (a legume that builds nitrogen in he soil), farmers will plant corn year after year, requiring still more synthetic nitrogen and doing long-term damage to the land.
Reason #4: Corn-based ethanol uses up huge volumes of precious and irreplacable water resources. That's right, growing corn and processing it into ethanol rquires huge volumes of water. Hey, there's plenty of water, right? Sorry, no dice. In the Plains states, where most U.S. corn is grown, the Ogallala Aquifer - "the largest underground reservoir in the United States and one of the largest on the planet" - is being rapidly depleted. According to a recent article on this subject, the Ogallala aquifer:
...once held as much water as Lake Huron. It is a treasure that took millennia to accumulate. Remarkably, it could cease to be a water source within another generation.And for what? To provide water to irrigators who grow surplus, subsidized corn -- the thirstiest of grain crops.
Great, huh? Well, it gets worse:
Other big losers in this heartland water grab are rivers and streams fed by the Ogallala. The Arkansas River, the United States+é-¦ fifth longest, once began its healthy flow near Leadville, Colo. Now a majority of the time there is no flow in the river at Dodge City, Kan., nearly 450 miles downstream. The river+é-¦s effective headwater is another 85 miles eastward, in Great Bend. The historic Platte River, which guided explorers and settlers westward in the 18th and 19th centuries, has effectively dried up in central Nebraska the past five summers.
Yeah, let's grow MORE corn and completely deplete the Ogallala forever, in order to continue driving our gas guzzlers around for a few more years. Brilliant.
Reason #5: Corn-based ethanol requires huge amounts of land. Among all the idiocies of ethanol, this one ranks right up there. A few facts. According to the USDA, 1 bushel of corn yields 2.5 gallons of ethanol. And 1 acre of land yields 160 bushels of corn, or 400 gallons of ethanol. As of 2004, the United States consumed 133 billion gallons of gasoline. To replace all this with ethanol would require 333 million acres of land. And that's not even taking into account the energy required to produce the ethanol. Oh, by the way, 333 million acres is almost as much as current total of U.S. cropland (434 million acres), and actually MORE than harvested cropland in this country. In other words, to fuel our vehicles with ethanol - assuming no energy inputs into making it - would take nearly all of U.S. cropland. But, of course, it takes large amounts of energy to produce ethanol - at best, maybe 0.7 gallons of oil to produce 1 gallon of ethanol - so it's actually a lot worse. You're basically talking about covering most of the land in the United States with corn, then using none of it for food, all of it for fuel. To be blunt, that's insane.
Reason #6: Corn-based ethanol is a huge corporate welfare boondoggle for big agribusiness, like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which makes at least 40% of the stuff. You know, I could go on and on with this analysis, all about how covering the entire planet with corn to fuel our cars wouldn't work, but would result in all of us starving to death in a world denuded of forests and water. But why bother? The politicians, in their infinited wisdom, have decided that ethanol makes sense. Or is that "cents," as in "dollars and cents?"
That's right, let's cut to the bottom line here, which is indeed "the bottom line." As we know, in trying to understand a complex phenomenon it is often very useful to follow the money. Where does the money from ethanol go? To quote a CATO Institute paper from 1995:
Nothing symbolizes ADM's political exploitation of Americans better than ethanol. Ethanol has become a magic obeisance button for politicians. Simply mention the word and politicians grovel like trained dogs, competing to heap the most praise on ethanol and its well-connected producers. Regardless of how uncompetitive the product may be, politicians have for years talked about ethanol as if it were the agricultural equivalent of holy water. Ethanol producers have received a de facto subsidy of nearly $10 billion since 1980--yet they continue demanding more, more, more.
Now, here's a February 2006 article from the environmental magazine Grist:
As for ethanol, the federal government reaffirmed its love affair with the stuff in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which renewed tax incentives for ethanol production and decreed that the U.S. gasoline supply contain 6 billion gallons of it by 2006, and 7.5 billion by 2012. Moreover, the Act requires that cars owned by federal agencies it exclusively.Even ethanol's most fervent apologists concede that it would have no market without sustained government action. In the 20 years the government has been supporting ethanol, ADM's ethanol line has gone from almost nothing to ADM's second-largest contributor to profit.
As if that's not bad enough, how about this:
...Supporters hail ethanol as a "renewable" energy source, but producing the corn for it is literally killing the topsoil in the Midwest, the United States' richest store of soil fertility. Corn is a prodigious nitrogen feeder, meaning producing vast monoculture plots of it requires constant lashings of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers.[...]
How do you grow anything to such abused soil? Simple: add more fertilizer. The resulting negative-feedback loop is fouling up more than just the Midwestern's layer of topsoil. Runoff from Midwestern fields destroys water-borne ecosystems all along the Mississippi clear down to the Gulf of Mexico, where nitrogen-gorged algae blot out all other marine life in a giant dead zone.
In sum, ethanol is an unmitigated disaster in just about every way - environmental, budgetary, energy balance ramifications, you name it. So why are politicians like Hillary Clinton touting it? Could they be ignorant of all the problems listed above?
Or, perhaps there's a simpler reason? For that, think money. Lots of it. For instance, agribusiness gave $53 million in political contributions in 2004, of which $38 million went to Republicans and $15 million to Democrats. Talk about spreading your money around. Obviously, ADM and other big agribusiness companies aren't giving this money out of the goodness of their hearts, either. You think they might just WANT something for their tens of millions of dollars? Like a few billion dollars per year in subsidies on ethanol, perhaps? Hmmmm....
One more reason why ethanol, despite its utter lunacy, isn't dumped into the dust bin of history where it belongs: think 2008 Presidential politics. More specifically, think Iowa, that great corn-growing state where ADM just recently announced it would build a huge ethanol plant. Is this all becoming clearer now? Ahhhh...the truth shall set you free!
That's the problem with realism, it so often leaves you frustrated that there isn't some kind of better idea out there.
And, as you have correctly pointed out, such ethanol makes no sense.
Other more efficient plant materials can make ethanol a very competitive or even less expensive option over foreign oil imports. Hay is used to make Ethanol. Switchgrass, a plant that has seen a lot of publicity lately, is so popular as a energy source the seeds of the plant are leaving the country faster every week. Where are they going? China.
Switchgrass is even used to raise the BTU of coal-fired generators.
Let's talk about how bad corn is for ethanol, but let's not confuse ALL ethanol with that made with corn. There are huge incentives, as you have noted, for people to talk up corn. Have you ever heard of the switchgrass lobby?
I encourage everyone to call or write the