Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

[WARNING: This is a long post, but Bush and Lula made me do it!]

Well, Presidents Bush and Lula of Brazil once again put ethanol on the front pages and lead stories in the news media. So let’s take the opportunity to look one more time at why humungous production of ethanol to replace gasoline is a bad idea for people and the Earth.

Or, to put it another way — oil is destroying the Earth one way — by burning fossil fuels that are spewing the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet to dangerous levels — while corn and sugar-based ethanol is destroying the Earth another way — putting fuel for our cars into competition with food production, threatening a couple of billion poor of our world with increasing hunger, while also being environmentally very unfriendly.

Pick your poison, as they say.

Even the Wall Street Journal made note of the environmental concerns in an editorial today:

Environmentalists also worry that a surge in ethanol production could lead Latin American farmers to seek more land to grow sugar cane and other crops, destroying rainforests.

Part of my task here is to find the sources that don’t make it onto the mainstream news, so I have a couple of links below that provide a starkly different set of facts.

Now I know we all want to find some liquid that we can simply put in our gasoline tanks and go on about our merry way. But if we choose to attempt to do this with ethanol, and especially in this country with corn-based ethanol, we will be making a moral choice about how we are going to live, with a preference for cars over food, people, and the land, over a sustainable future that means, whether we like it or not, reducing altogether our use of energy — yes, as in driving a lot less, having fewer cars and only those that get 50 or more mpg, flying less, paying carbon taxes that would go in part to alternative forms of transportation, like mass transit and bike trails, and blah, blah, blah — you know the drill.

To save the atmosphere, the planet, to save human beings from a future of terrible suffering, we must drastically reduce our use of energy here in the post-industrial West. Again, the choice: a different way of constructing the energy base of our lives to stop the destruction of our atmosphere and land and people — or attempting to hold onto a way of life that has no long-term future and will bring the climate and the world’s people to potential catastrophe.

Oh some people just hate it when you put it like that, as if there is a moral choice being made here, one for which we are all responsible. That’s just plain uncomfortable. But let’s be clear, that is what is involved here.

Now President Chavez of Venezuela has a charming way with words, and he certainly knows how to offend the Bush administration, but I could not help but smile at this quote from yesterday’s NY Times:

[Chavez] accused the United States of trying “to substitute the production of foodstuffs for animals and human beings with the production of foodstuffs for vehicles, to sustain the American way of life.”

Now, having an oil-based economy, much of which revenues are going towards social programs for the poor (including the poor in this country), Chavez has reason to cast doubt on Bush’s and Lula’s memo of understanding for a joint effort to promote the production and use of ethanol. Nevertheless, it strikes a chord, don’t you think. Isn’t that precisely what this strategy is intended to do?

By the way, you can read the NY Times article on the Bush/Lula meeting, and the Chavez response, here.

Of course, Venezuela’s oil industry is contributing enormously to our global warming problem, and that raises once again the question of the right of the poor to increase their emissions as they become less poor, while the rich who created the vast majority of greenhouse gases now causing our climate crisis must reduce their emissions to allow that to occur, all while bringing emissions down to a level that can halt the planet’s heating. Will this be possible? Not with the kind of leadership we see on display in the Bush administration.

So, here’s an article from Reuters’ environmental news service, Planet Ark, regarding the issue of how ethanol production will increase hunger in the world, having already brought riots over rising corn prices in Mexico (we blogged about this recently). The article notes that for the first time since World War II, food prices as a proportion of income are rising instead of falling. Do we really want to reverse this trend in a world where already a couple of billion people do not have enough to eat?

Here’s another interesting article from our friends at Grist, comparing the US corn ethanol industry with Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry — like apples and oranges. Many eye-opening facts here, but just a couple I want to highlight: Brazil started developing their’s in the 1970s! Also noteworthy: the difference in the ‘net energy balance’ - corn a mere 1.3, sugarcane somewhere between 8.2 and 10.3, sugar therefore being more energy efficient by a factor of 8. Then there is the comparison between a voracious energy appetite in the US up against one, well, much less voracious. In other words, Brazil does not provide the best model for a US ethanol industry.

Another note: Brazil’s private sector developed a flex-fuel car in tandem with the ethanol industry, thereby guaranteeing a market for it. A somewhat different approach than Detroit’s SUV strategy of the past couple of decades.

Meanwhile, Brazil is thrilled about the international market that is opening up for their ethanol, and the government plans to ratchet up production. For a reality test in terms of what this means for Brazil’s poor, check out this article, Brazil’s ethanol plan breeds rural poverty,environmental degradation, from our colleagues at the Interhemispheric Resource Center’s America’s Program. A tidbit:

Many citizen organizations in Brazil are concerned that what appears to be an economic panacea may be a social and ecological disaster. They claim that as the industry expands and more hectares are planted mono-cropping sugarcane, existing problems in rural areas of landlessness, hunger, unemployment, environmental degradation, and agrarian conflicts will be exacerbated…

There is concern that while expansion of the ethanol industry may boost Brazil’s GDP and some Brazilians will become very wealthy in the process, the majority of the population will not benefit from the ethanol export boom. Given U.S. plans to increase imports of Brazilian ethanol and the alliance slated to be forged during Bush’s South America visit in March, it is likely the livelihoods of many Brazilians, especially the rural poor, will be subordinated to maintain U.S. consumption.

Sounds a bit like what Chavez said, if more polite.

Brazil’s ethanol industry is very bad news for labor and for the land, as this excellent article describes.

And while you’re at it, here is a link to another IRC article on the Bush/Lula ethanol deal. These two articles will provide all the info you need to appreciate what is wrong with the US/Brazil ethanol hoopla.

Okay, that’s plenty for one weekend. Good reading. And while you’re at it, bring your best ethical framework as you wade through this material. We’d love to know where that takes you.

[tags]ethanol, Bush and Lula, US-Brazil ethanol agreement, global warming[/tags]