Here's another article I ran across recently about the increasingly louder and louder debate over the issue of corn for food and fuel. The ethanol industry is now consuming nearly 50% of the corn grown in the Country to put into fuel. This has caused the cost of food from corn products to skyrocket in price over the last 4-5 years or so. There are now many US Congressmen who are questioning whether the EPA needs to be "reigned in" on the ethanol mandates. Here's the article:
Ethanol: Growing Food, Feed, Fiber, and Fuel?
Evidence Growing That Using
Corn to Help Fill Gas Tanks Might Not Be the Best Use of Crops, Tech, and
Scarce Taxpayer Dollars
Excerpted from the book Food Fight. To learn more about the Farm
Bill and purchase a copy of Food Fight please visitwww.foodfight2012.org
Most analysts agree that we are rapidly approaching “peak oil,”
the point when the volume of global oil production begins to decline. In
response, Farm Bill programs have promoted a shift to liquid “biofuels” and
“biomass” energy derived from farms. The Renewable Fuels Standard of the Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007, for instance, boosted the country’s
ethanol production by mandating that up to 36 billion gallons be blended into
gasoline by 2022.1 But taxpayers have been investing in this industry for
decades via corn subsidies, import tariffs, tax credits for every gallon of
ethanol blended with gasoline, loan guarantees, construction cost-shares, and
gas pump upgrades. For politicians and lobbyists, ethanol became a sacred cow,
untouchable, because of the belief that these public investments would 1)
support farmers, 2) reduce dependence on foreign oil (currently about 60
percent of U.S. oil consumption), 3) cut greenhouse gas emissions, and 4)
strengthen national defense.
The high costs of these policies—$17 billion between 2005 and 2009
alone—are now being viewed in a more critical light.
The Mounting Case Against Corn
Ethanol
By early 2011, drums were finally beating inside the nation’s
capital for a repeal of ethanol subsidies and tax breaks that were sucking up
$7 billion per year or more from American taxpayers. Some Iowa counties were
reportedly receiving up to $26,800 per rural household in ethanol subsidies,
despite evidence that using corn to help fill gas tanks might not be the best
use of crops, technology, and scarce taxpayer dollars.
First is the simple energy in, energy out equation. In other
words, the amount of power you actually get out of ethanol for what’s required
to grow and refine it. Recent analyses reveal that when all of the “well to
wheel” inputs of growing, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, drying, and
processing are tallied, at least two-thirds of a gallon of oil are needed to
produce a gallon of ethanol (roughly a 33 percent “net energy balance”).
The bulk of energy used to make ethanol currently comes from coal-
or natural gas-fired power plants. Which makes you wonder, how renewable can
the fuel be if you need nonrenewable energy to produce it?
Depending on which life cycle assessment you read (there are
dozens to ponder), the shift from hydrocarbon- to carbohydrate-based fuels
could either ease particulate emissions and global warming significantly or
actually make things far worse. In 2005, Dan Kaman of the University of
California at Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group reported a 10 to 15 percent
per mile reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from corn-based ethanol. On the
same campus, Tad Patzak argued that in its present form, ethanol produces 50
percent more carbon dioxide and sulfur emissions (along with lung and eye
irritants) than fossil fuels. According to Michael Bomford of Kentucky State
University, the differences between studies almost entirely depend upon how
researchers assess the value of the byproduct livestock feed (the “leftovers”
from milling plants into ethanol, called dried distiller grains and solubles or
DDGS, are often fed to livestock).
The Case for Conservation
Even the most ardent proponents admit that, at best, biofuels can
only ever be a part of a diversified energy future. There is simply not enough
french fry grease to satisfy the world’s diesel addiction, and only so much
arable land. Already about 30 million acres or 36 percent of the U.S. corn crop
(the equivalent of all the cropland in Iowa and then some) is dedicated to
ethanol corn—but the output is displacing a mere 8 percent of gas.
The same amount of gasoline could have been displaced simply by
increasing fleet-wide fuel economy just 1.1 miles per gallon. (And that would
have saved American taxpayers nearly $20 billion between 2005 and 2011 alone.)
Clearly, increasing fuel efficiency and cultivating a public
consciousness around conservation is a more effective way to reduce gasoline
use than corn ethanol. Some other common sense ways that the Environmental
Working Group reports could improve gas mileage without a costly ethanol
industry include common sense car maintenance (regular oil changes, proper tire
inflation, and filter replacements), better all-around driving habits that
avoid excessive speeding and acceleration, and higher industry standards for
fuel efficiency.
If helping small farmers diversify their economic portfolios was
another goal of federal policy makers, ethanol has failed to deliver. What
began as a movement of farmer-owned and -operated small-scale plants has given
way to facilities dominated by global giants like Archer Daniels Midland,
Broin, and ICM, Inc.
Ethanol’s Stewardship Legacy?
Food prices are on the rise around the globe. Land values
throughout the Corn Belt are skyrocketing. And the grim reality is sinking in
that even if the entire U.S. corn crop were distilled into liquid fuel, it
would still supply less than 20 percent of domestic demand. Conservationists
worry about the vulnerability of transforming every potentially productive
acre—including land set aside for conservation and protected grasslands and
parklands—into some form of biofuel monoculture.
Any benefits of the ethanol boom—increased farm revenue,
significant reductions in subsidy payments, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and
a more diversified fuel supply— come with a potentially unaffordable
environmental price tag. As the demand for fuel corn pushes farmers to
intensify their land use, soil and water quality are starting to suffer.
Some optimists hope that farming standards can prevent the worst
damage. In 2011, European countries agreed upon standards for sustainable
cultivating and harvesting of biofuel crops. Similar efforts have stalled,
however, in the United States, where there is still no consensus on what
constitutes “sustainable” farming practices. There are also legitimate concerns
that over-harvesting “crop residues” like wheat straw, corn stalks, etc.,
eventually will impoverish the soil. Sir Albert Howard, the early-20th-century
pioneer of the organic and sustainable farming movements, called this “The Law
of Return,” where “what comes from the soil must return to the soil.” Organic
matter must be added back into soil for it to stay productive. In addition,
harvesting cellulose from lands now set aside to protect wildlife could have
devastating consequences to biodiversity and reverse decades of gains made by
Farm Bill conservation programs.
Before we continue to subsidize biofuels, we must ask ourselves:
• How much further will federal mandates for biofuel production
drive idled lands into production?
• Will parks, forests, and other public lands become vulnerable to
energy exploitation and food production?
• How will bio-refineries manage the challenges of seasonality,
storage, and transport of crops?
• What are the long-term consequences of “super weeds” now resistant
to herbicides used in genetically engineered crops?
• Will food and energy shortages feed on one another?
• Can subsidies be structured to protect farmers during price
falls, and to protect taxpayers from huge payouts to biofuels producers that no
longer need them?
Perhaps a long-term benefit will emerge from all this, once
ethanol ceases to be a way for huge corporations to profitably dump excess
corn, and a more logical energy order arises. A sensible biofuel movement could
evolve, embracing a diversification of fuel and nonfuel crops on landscapes
that include crop rotations, streamside protection, the maintenance of healthy
soils, and abundant wildlife habitat and wild areas.
"Pete" Landry.........comments welcome at way2gopete@yahoo.com
