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It's Time to Scrap the Ethanol Boondoggle
Government-funded conversion to "biofuels" such as ethanol is scarcely helping with energy efficiency and is exacerbating a global food crisis. It's time for Canada to reverse course on this failed approach.
Around the world, governments have enthusiastically embraced ethanol and other biofuels in recent years. Fuel from plant sources would, the thinking went, greatly reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and, for some countries, would also reduce reliance on foreign oil.
Skeptics have long warned that ethanol is no miracle cure, offering slight energy gains at best. But in country after country, powerful farm lobbies have encouraged government subsidies for ethanol.
Now, however, the pendulum is swinging strongly in the other direction. Last fall Jean Ziegler, the UN's "special rapporteur on the right to food," claimed it was a "crime against humanity" to divert corn from food to fuel. That claim resonates more loudly this spring, because of fast-rising grain prices -- and resulting unrest -- around the world. The enormous investment in biofuels in the U.S., the European Union, Canada and elsewhere, we are coming to see, is fuelling a food crisis in poor countries.
To be sure, there are also other, bigger reasons for the global food crisis that has arisen lately. Drought in Australia, for example, has greatly reduced that country's rice crop. (So has a boom in wine-grape production.) And in China and other countries, people once malnourished are now eating more grain while simultaneously demanding more meat from grain-fed animals.
Grain-shortage causes such as those are intractable, but government mandates for biofuel are not. It is fine that corn farmers are planting every acre they can plow, but at present prices would be high even without the biofuel boondoggle. The obvious solution is to stop biofuel production in its tracks. But countries from Canada to Britain are not scrapping their biofuel requirements with anything like the speed with which they imposed them.
Canada's federal government set a goal of five per cent ethanol in gasoline by 2010. As part of its legislated biofuel package, Ottawa is also subsidizing ethanol production by 10 cents a litre. This program and related biofuel measures will cost up to $1.5 billion over seven years.
Last year, the U.S. Congress mandated a fivefold increase in the use of biofuels. And presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all know a farm-state vote-getter when they see one. Clinton and Obama are calling for more ethanol factories, to replace 15 per cent of conventional fuel with ethanol.
Britain's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation came into force this week, requiring that oil sold in Britain contain biofuel. Environmentalists condemned the U.K. government's "perverse obstinacy" and "utter folly" in insisting on biofuels. If the same environmentalists turned their sights on Ottawa, Washington and Brussels, they could say exactly the same thing.
This refusal to acknowledge that biofuel should not be the object of legislated, enforced use will lead to even worse troubles in the world. Biofuel might have a place, but what that place should be needs to be very carefully weighted against damage to the environment and disruption of the world's food production.
There might still be a major use for ethanol some day, and research should continue. Brazil has made good progress, for example, in using non-food plant material such as sugar-cane waste to produce ethanol. But because prices are high, vast tracts of rainforest are being razed there to make way for sugarcane farms.
There are no short-cuts to reducing oil use and greenhouse gas emissions. But for the moment, at least, conservation measures seem far more promising than substitutes which are proving to be so much snake oil.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
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24 Comments so far
Show AllAnd don't be fooled that switching to switchgrass is a solution. Going to cellulosic ethanol amounts to nothing more than moving cars down the food chain a few links. If you think having them compete with people for food is a problem, wait 'till they are starving out the organisms at the very base of the food chain.
I have never understood the 'switchgrass solution' and often wondered if it is not just a diversion for real debate?
I am not generaly a conspiracy theorist, but maybe someone out there keeps us reading about hemp and switchgrass for hours to take our minds off real important stuff.
Well its about time. Others who were 'in the know' of the ethanal scam have been raily against it for years.
"I think that reducing and recycling all fuel and electricity operated engines is an urgent and elemental necessity of all humanity. The dilemma is not in the reduction of energy costs, but in the idea of turning foodstuffs into fuel." Quote from none other than Fidel Castro, March 28, 2007
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2007/ing/f280307i.html
He gives also the requirements in foods' costs to be able to make Ethanol work.
Also, ask any Brazilean, they have been using Ethanol since the late 70's, and are very familiar of the engine short life once you start using it.
I don't think there's any conspiracy to it. Most of us don't know very much about where out own food comes from, expecting the general public to look at biofuels from the perspective of soil bacteria is pretty far out there. Unfortunately that's the sort of perceptual shift that's called for in this time of dwindling and ever more problematic fossil fuel supplies. Carbohydrates are the currency of life. The complex carbohydrates, cellulose, lignin and such are no less important than the starches and sugars of "food" crops. Just because WE can't digest them doesn't make them "waste". I'll relax when the average Joe recognizes that burning a pile of leaves is a crime against nature.
America's corporations are more than willing to participate in conspiracies, the most recent is the mad dash to convert America's corn crop into ethanol even though world grain supplies are at all time lows. At the time of last fall's grain harvest there was less than 60 days worth of grain stocks, back in the 70's when ethanol was first promoted as a fuel there was nearly a years worth of excess grain and Uncle Sam was paying farmers to leave some land unplanted.
Today on the Chicago Board of Trade corn is $6.13 a bushel and soybeans are $13.77 a bushel. At prices this high many in the third world are priced out of the market for food. Food has been intentionally weaponized with governments and the rich now having another tool to control and suppress the masses.
Biofuel production in Brazil has also fired up tremedous threats to the Indigenous peoples.The 1988 Federal Constitution, Article 231 (that folllowed the dictatorship in that country) guarantees indigenous rights and is up against massive expansion of industrial agriculture in the court system.
Lands have been invaded, deforested, people are being murdered, for an international finance 'culture' of agribusiness that is choking the world. Between large scale eucalyptus, sugar cane, soy and bovine, people are being driven in to degrading and slave labor, driven off the land and into cities without infrastructure to support them. The promise of fast money and power is deadly, short sighted if not completly blind, selling a bill of goods down increasingly polluted rivers.
Somebody is going to make a bundle of money on the ethanol fiasco. I am not sure who or which companies that will be. We all better start to follow the money. Is it Monsanto?
And much of this could have been avoided if the fuel efficiency of autos was required by law to improve. Sad. Yes, it is a crime against humanity.
You say:
"Brazil has made good progress, for example, in using non-food plant material such as sugar-cane waste to produce ethanol."
I would like to read the support for this statement, but there is no link given.
On the contrary, I understand that Brasil diverts production of sugar into production of ethanol for biofuel. The trash is insignificant by comparison. The genius of the "Brasilian solution" is its flexibility - when/if sugar prices ever climb, then they will produce sugar - and when (as now) the price of ethanol is high, then they will produce ethanol instead.
You say:
"Fuel from plant sources would, the thinking went, greatly reduce carbon-dioxide emissions".
It is true that burning ethanol instead of oil can produce less carbon dioxide, but that is only half the story. When/if forests are cleared to produce sugar (or corn, etc), then there is a NET GAIN in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is true because a forest holds more carbon dioxide than the crop that is planted in its place. The forest "sequesters" carbon dioxide, it is a "sink", reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Clearing a forest releases far more carbon dioxide than any replacement crop can "sequester".
First, all who send their aluminum cans to the landfill, and there's a lot of you out there, have no credibility on energy.
I would also remind the critics of corn ethanol that you can buy petroleum and send your three bucks to Saudi Arabia and never see it again or you can spend that money on ethanol, send it to rural America, put it in some farmer's pocket who will spend it. It will get spent 20 or 30 times over helping local economies all along the way before it finally ends up in the pockets of Wall Street Bankers.
Even if the environmental impact between petroleum and ethanol is more or less equal, the positive economic impact on rural areas will trickle up as it always does as the dollars are spent, and re-spent benefiting the economy as a whole.
By the way, though many products contain corn by-products, direct consumption of corn is a very small percentage of total usage and I would guess it's diversion to ethanol production has less to do with rising world food costs than the price of the energy used to produce, process, and deliver your gruel. Most corn is fed to livestock.
I don't think y'all get it; Canada is creating jobs and an economy by pursuing biofuels. It works in the same way as using more natural gas energy to mine oil shales (which creates jobs, etc).
Yes, biofuels (and oil shales) are grossly inefficient and stupid, but "our leaders" are not at all interested in efficiencies of operation. Politicians care only of money (through kickbacks) and votes.
If it is a crime against humanity to convert corn from food to fuel, then it must follow that it is a crime against humanity to convert corn to whiskey (or grain to beer, grapes to rice). It is also a crime against humanity to feed livestock because we all know that to be a very inefficient way to produce food. It is a crime against humanity when sub-par produce is thrown into big garbage cans at the grocery store. It is a crime against humanity to go boating, or take vacations. All of these things are wasting the earth's resources. Yet only ethanol is being singled out as causing food shortages.
The message here is that it's okay to waste resources. Just don't use any resources to replace that from which the oil industry makes a killing off of. Exxon Mobile is suddenly concerned about starvation. I wonder why.
How about using hemp for biofuel/ethanol?
Oh, yeah--it grows easily as a weed, needs no fertilizer, can grow just about anywhere, even in poor soil.
Gee, let 'em grow hemp, and the next thing you know, they'll want to grow cannabis too!
The main reason for rising corn prices is that China is now not exporting corn. The staples that are in short supply are wheat and rice. I am a farmer from ND. Wheat became totally un-economical to grow. I searched for any other crop that I could grow so that I wouldn't lose the farm.
The other main factor behind rising food costs is the rising cost of oil. Without the ethanol a gallon of gas would be.25 to .30 higher. Do we want that? And the economic impact of producing ethanol, as noted by a fellow above, to our suffering rural areas is tremendous.
The oil co's are scared out of their minds about ethanol as they don't own that production......at least not yet.
Montreal Gazette, you get it completely wrong. I am looking forward to the day when a majority adopts the truth about ethanol and alcohol fuel
JStevens has it right. Why the heck is fuel ethanol being singled out for all the worlds problems? We should also blame people who DRINK ethanol. Where do people think beer, wine, vodka, wiskey come from? If the U.S. goverment were to suddenly forbid the use of grapes for ethanol (it's called wine!) and require that the land only be used for food production there would be a revolt.
It may not be the best solution in the world, but ethanol production for fuel is a result of huge demand for oil. It's as if the people here whining about fuel ethanol think they are not part of the problem. They are 'directly' the problem. What's the mileage on the SUVs driving kids to soccer/hockey?
This is a comprehensive 76 page report discussing energy from every concievable angle:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ISIS_energy_review_exec_sum.pdf
I think this deserves some looking at.... Makes you wonder who to believe??
http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/
As a practical matter, 10% Ethanol gasoline gives 12-15% lower gas mileage, and when I use it my car doesn't run as well. Also the fact that Ethanol was supposed to keep the price-per-gallon down, and I've seen none of that.
So, who benefits? Not the motorist, that's for sure.
Ethanol's problems are numerous:
* Topsoil may be a finite resource as it is. Let's save it for growing food.
* Monocultures, GMO's, pesticides, etc. aren't really in nature's best interest -- or ours.
* The biomass still needs to go through a refining process.
* It's not "decentralizable". Unlike solar, wind or geothermal, it's not really concievable for communities (and private individuals) to own their own power plants. It's another energy source which is desirable to neoliberals and neocons because it brings the sort of people to the table that they're used to doing business with (probably taking kickbacks from): industry autocrats.
People just don't want to face the fact that carbon-based fuels are environmentally damaging and economically unsustainable. The developed world's energy-intensive lifestyle has to be modified, and nonpolluting, renewable sources substituted. The farmers can support themselves feeding the 6.5 billion of us without starving people and trashing the planet.
Would someone tell Barack Obama about this. This one is another one of change ideas that really is about the status quo.
"Why the heck is fuel ethanol being singled out for all the worlds problems? We should also blame people who DRINK ethanol. Where do people think beer, wine, vodka, wiskey come from? If the U.S. goverment were to suddenly forbid the use of grapes for ethanol (it's called wine!) and require that the land only be used for food production there would be a revolt."
First off, it is not being singles out for all the world's problems. It is being acknowledged as contributing to a few problems (namely deforestation and high food prices).
Next, whilst in a rush to make a snarky post, you neglected to consider the fact that ethanol (by the way, not all alcohols made from grapes are wine, Google grappa, for instance) imparts calories (i.e. energy) to the people who drink it. Alcohol also has medicinal properties such as helping reduce atherosclerosis.