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Can we admit corn ethanol is a mistake?

March 14, 2008

Here in Illinois there are signs by the road touting the value of corn ethanol.  But there are a lot of reasons why hardly anyone outside the corn lobby thinks it’s a good idea to make fuel from food.  One is that it screws up food markets around the world.  Uber-conservative high-energy technologist Cajun skewers the unintended consequences of food-to-fuel economics: 

“…And people will starve… Doesn’t that make you want to go find your nearest E85 pump?”

But there’s another way that corn ethanol screws with food markets, which Cajun doesn’t mention and which directly affects his neck of the woods in Louisiana – record high corn prices equals more marginal land being pushed into corn production, with more nitrogen runoff. Which leads in one short step to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, an ever-growing anoxic region of the Gulf where there’s no shrimp, no crab, no fish.  Just algae and bacteria.

Chris Mooney, writing on science policy vs. the corn lobby, says:

“We Need Sound Policy Before the Science Gets Hijacked…The future of biofuels does not lie in corn, even if the future of many U.S. companies and politicians might.”

Politicians have never been able to tell the difference between a lobbyist and a scientist.  But here’s a hint: the scientist usually doesn’t try to bribe them; they don’t make enough money. 

No Illinois politician dares to question corn ethanol.  But it’s a bad idea, and a good example of why it’s also a bad idea for the government to be pushing specific technologies instead of specific results.  Funding research is fine, even essential.  But the government ought to be pushing for specific outcomes – carbon neutrality, energy independence, clean water and so forth.  You put a tax on carbon emissions, levy fines for water pollution, and fund research into alternatives, and corporations will figure out what to do from there.  It might help us go down fewer blind alleys like corn ethanol.

  1. March 14, 2008 at 09:40 | #1

    Ummm…

    But it doesn’t have to make sense DOF, it just has to make ADM money. :)   Which in turn they give to the good folks in Congress, who pass new laws to increase the subsidy to the corn growers and the makers of Ethanol (them), causing the cost of food and fuel to rise (which not counted as inflation anymore).  And as ADM and farmers switch from wheat to corn (BT corn that kills butterflies and may be a cause of the Colony Collapse Syndrome), and corn that went to feeding people and animals is now used for fuel, causing even more food prices to rise and people to starve, and so on, and so on.

    Then there is the power and water issues.  Using corn to make ethanol is not an effective use of energy, and you have to pump a lot of water out of the ground or rivers to both produce that energy and ethanol.

    Yeppers, it is one of the many stupid things we as a nation have done this century. ;P:

  2. james old guy
    March 14, 2008 at 09:56 | #2

    I never did buy the corn ethanol plan. Alternatives have to be found but at the expense of the food supply is not really a plan its a reaction.

  3. March 14, 2008 at 11:09 | #3

    I have argued against corn ethanol for the last couple years on my blog. It’s really a dumb idea and I still have yet to figure out why the TreeHuggers latched onto it. If you have to have ethanol, cellulosic ethanol is much more efficient and worth while as well as sustainable.

    All that aside I still disagree with Cajun’s statement:

    “…And people will starve… Doesn’t that make you want to go find your nearest E85 pump?”

    It assumes that the government doesn’t waste money anywhere else and that corn subsidies are the only reason people are starving. Iraq war is a great waste of money, as is Cold War Funding, how about the ROI of welfare? At least with E85 it’s grown here in the US and doesn’t support fundamentalists overseas. There are plenty of ways to get money to help those starving in other countries. We’d just rather blow us up some ragheads instead.

  4. March 14, 2008 at 11:11 | #4

    Fucking filter…

    the #‘s in my previous post translate to a word that rhymes with baghead, only replace the ‘b’ with an ‘r’.

  5. March 14, 2008 at 13:06 | #5

    I think you missed the point Webs.  It isn’t a matter of the money the government gives to ethanol subsidies somehow instead going to starving people in Africa.  It’s a matter of those subsidy dollars screwing with the economics of agriculture and thus with global food markets.  It’s about economics, not charity.

  6. March 15, 2008 at 13:01 | #6

    I can only speak for my own vehicle but what I save
    on the lower price of gasohol..maybe four cents a gallon..I lose in efficiency..more than lose actually..milage goes from 20mpg to 16mpg ..and the vehicle doesn’t have the power that it has with regular unleaded..

    Corn is for drinkin’…not burnin’’

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