Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

After yesterday’s post on Archer Daniels Midland and the corn-based ethanol scam, I thought I’d look around for more info on the government program to subsidize this very destructive biofuel.

Interestingly, this is an issue that joins together environmentalists, family farmers, and right-wing free enterprise groups that either loathe this form of corporate welfare or find the program wasteful in terms of your tax dollars.

So here are a couple more links that will help fill out the picture.  The National Center for Policy Analysis is a conservative, actually Libertarian group, and this little tidbit about ADM, ethanol and government subsidies was written in the late 1990s.   And here is a little something from the very right-wing American Enterprise magazine, connected to the American Enterprise Institute which basically opposes most public programs and would like to see just about everything privatized.

Now here is a piece from someone a bit more authoritative, Cornell University’s Dr. David Pimentel.  An excerpt from this 2003 article in the Cornell Chronicle:

The approximately $1 billion a year in current federal and state subsidies (mainly to large corporations) for ethanol production are not the only costs to consumers, the Cornell scientist observes. Subsidized corn results in higher prices for meat, milk and eggs because about 70 percent of corn grain is fed to livestock and poultry in the United States. Increasing ethanol production would further inflate corn prices, Pimentel said, noting: “In addition to paying tax dollars for ethanol subsidies, consumers would be paying significantly higher food prices in the marketplace.”

And another:

Nickels and dimes aside, some drivers still would rather see their cars fueled by farms in the Midwest than by oil wells in the Middle East, Pimentel acknowledges, so he calculated the amount of corn needed to power an automobile:

The average U.S. automobile, traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix), would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel. This would take 11 acres to grow, based on net ethanol production. This is the same amount of cropland required to feed seven Americans.

If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.

Pimentel is one of this country’s top experts in this field and if you click the link on his name, it will take you to more information about and by him.  It will also get you to a site with critical information on the coming oil crisis, as we pass or are about to pass peak oil production.

Of course, others are blogging about this - here’s one of them.

There is no easy way out of the coming crisis, no matter how much of the Earth’s land we destroy with ethanol crop production.  But the destruction that will come if we continue to pursue this agribusiness course will only bring about with accelerated speed the breakdown of the Earth’s life support systems that sustain our existence.