ll The Presidential Candidates Rape The Environment for Ethanol?
August 13, 2004
John Kerry wants to double our ethanol production, to 5 billion gallons per year. So does President Bush and most of the U.S. Congress. Especially in a presidential election year.
Ethanol makes farmers feel all warm and fuzzy, and farmers will vote for both Presidential and Senate candidates in closely contested Midwest states this fall. Farm votes could actually swing the White House and the Senate.
Even eco-activists regard ethanol as better for the planet. It doesn’t burn significantly cleaner, but it’s “renewable.”
There’s only one problem. Corn takes land. Land good enough to farm is the scarcest resource on the planet. To convert to ethanol we would have to clear most of America’s forests and/or drain our wetlands, and still end up with more erosion-prone land used for corn.
An acre of corn produces about 300 gallons of ethanol per year. U.S. vehicles burn about 300 BILLION gallons of gasoline per year. Cars can burn an 85 percent ethanol blend without engine damage, but we’d need to plant 850 million acres of corn. The United States doesn’t have that much cropland. U.S. farmers currently plant only 330 million acres to crops in total, and only 73 million acres of corn.
The additional ethanol plants already being built will demand another 6 to 10 million acres of corn by 2008. Which state’s wildlife habitat will we clear to supply them?
Don’t forget that better emissions technology has already cut air pollution per car by nearly 95 percent, and hybrid gas-electric vehicles promise to give us 40 percent more miles per gallon burned.
Remember, too, that American farmers last year harvested the world’s largest-ever corn crop-and it wasn’t enough to meet the global demand for livestock feed. Grain prices went so high that ethanol plants couldn’t bid for corn. World grain stocks went down. Rain forest was cleared for farming in the tropics.
If America seriously tried to burn ethanol, we’d probably start by planting grain on the 32 million acres of high-risk land in the U.S. Conservation Reserve. Much of that land, however, is prone to drought and wind erosion. Worse, its yields would be low.
The most “promising” corn production possibility would be to drain lots of wetlands. They’d produce high yields of corn. But they’d no longer produce lots of frogs, fish, birds and dragonflies.
More important, the world is heading for three times as much feed demand in 2050. The human population will grow by perhaps 1.5 billion before it tops out. China’s meat demand is soaring, India’s milk demand is soaring, and neither of those densely populated countries has any additional cropland available.
Brazil has a lot of pasture and brushland that could be planted to corn, supplying world food and feed demand while America turns its corn into ethanol. But that would give Brazil the profitable part of the corn market. The U.S. and its taxpayers would spend tens of billons of tax dollars, and the National Research Council says our air wouldn’t be any cleaner. Plus, we’d still need fossil fuels for our power plants.
Nor would U.S. farmers be richer; they’d still be selling the same amount of corn.
If we decide we must have an alcohol fuel anyway, we could import it from Brazil’s sugar cane fields at half the cost, both economically and environmentally. In fact, cane sugar is the most efficient source of biofuel on the planet. (The U.S. only grows sugar beets.) That it would help Brazil’s economy, and ours, with less environmental impact on three continents.
Ethanol is one of the election year standbys. But it may not be good for America’s environment, for the taxpayers-or even the farmers.
Posted in Commentary |