Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I believe this firmly — if it is left to the profit motives of huge corporations, the path the US trods towards new fuels for your gas tank is going to be very destructive.

So here is an instructive piece from the Sunday NY Times.  It is about Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest agribusiness corporations, and its huge corporate bet on corn-based ethanol.

We wrote about this previously.  Corn-based ethanol is energy intensive, involves massive use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), will devour land needed for food, cause more of our basic food production to move offshore, and make us even less food secure than we are now.

I believe I linked with this article in a previous posts some weeks ago.  Ethanol and ADM have another ‘dirty little secret,‘ that ADM is powering their ethanol plants in Nebraska and Iowa with the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, coal.  They are poisoning the air out there in farmland to rake in the profits from this Earth-unfriendly fuel source.

Just how unfriendly is ADM to the environment?  Well, says this article from CorpWatch:

Despite the company’s attempts at green packaging, ADM is ranked as the tenth worst corporate air polluter, on the “Toxic 100″ list of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts

But we assure its wasteful, dirty future by giving ethanol production, which means A.D. M., a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon and putting tarrifs on the imports of sugar-based ethanol from countries like Brazil (sugar ethanol also has big problems, as readers of this blog know).  Sets things up nicely for big agribusiness, which already has way too much control over our lives — what we eat, its quality, what is happening to our agricultural lands, the pervasiveness of GMOs, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and more.

I found a short article from 2003 written by Nicholas E. Hollis, President of the Agribusiness Council.  He calls corn-based ethanol one of the nation’s greatest ’scams.’   At the end of his article is a link to a group called Corporate Agribusiness Research Project (CARP).  Looks very interesting.  The group has a pretty bleak view of the future of farming in this country as agribusiness swallows up what was once a bedrock for communities and families across the country.

Remember, you are paying for all this with your tax money, where huge amounts of public funds are going to the big companies making ethanol in the form of subsidies, and none more than ADM.  Why do they get such favors from your government?  Might it have anything to do with contributions to political parties?

Leaders of both parties have also gone to bat consistently for ADM , the agribusiness giant owned by longtime political donor Dwayne Andreas. Since January 1991 Andreas, his wife and his company have given the political parties more than $2.5 million in soft money; ADM’s almost $1.7 million in GOP contributions make it the Number 3 Republican giver for the period. [article 'A History of Favors' from Common Cause]

And isn’t it interesting that ADM’s new CEO arrives via Chevron.  Suddenly, an agribusiness company looks more and more like a member of the energy industry.  Certainly would have good friends in high places, not least of them Sec. of State Condie Rice, who was a Chevron director for 10 years, from 1991 to 2001 when she took the job as National Security Advisor in the first Bush term.

I don’t know about you, but I just don’t think I want to be putting my energy future in the hands of these corporate giants and those whose bills they pay.   There is something very, very wrong with this picture, and we must really educate ourselves, become very energy savvy, and not let ourselves be sold a bill of goods in the desperate hope that we can keep all these car engines running.