more on the ethanol debate
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Posted on May 21, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Today from Margaret Swedish:
One of my posts yesterday focused on the ethanol debate. As an alternative to oil, ethanol will help reduce our dependence on foreign oil sources and, so the discussion goes, using ethanol in our cars and getting automakers to produce more flex-fuel cars will therefore enhance US national security.
But there are questions related to the impact of ethanol on agriculture, a debate on whether or not production of crops for ethanol will compete with production of grain for food (there will be far greater profits, at least for now, in the ethanol business), and whether or not shifting to ethanol will have any impact on overall carbon emissions, the leading cause of human-induced global warming, since it takes a whole lot of carbon to produce ethanol.
So, I thought I'd put a couple of links here today to help readers get a better sense of the debate. The Washington Post had an article in this morning's paper on how ethanol may be the product that revives Iowa's agricultural economy. Corn farmers are described as "giddy" over the potential for profits. The industry is growing fast, despite great uncertainty about the future, including the future competition among farmers, states, and nations eager to get ethanol (corn-based in Iowa, sugar-cane based in Brazil, and the incipient but promising cellulosic crops like switchgrass, made famous in Bush's State of the Union address last January).
So this article will give you an idea of the economics and politics around ethanol.
The issue of whether or not ethanol production will undermine food production, and thereby potentially increase world hunger, is addressed in this linked article from the NY Times from last January. Proponents of ethanol say that ethanol production does not compete with food production since most of the corn raised for ethanol would have gone for feed. Says a professor at Iowa State Univ., "corn grown in Iowa is used mostly to feed farm animals or make corn syrup for processed foods."
But according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, energy demand could well translate into higher costs for food and instability in prices.
Some say that the result will be simply more agriculture, more corn grown for both food and fuel. However, since industrial agriculture is already part of the problem of global warming and resource depletion, care should be taken about going into more mass production of grain. A member of the Independent Science Panel, Peter Saunders, told the European Parliament in 2004 that industrial agriculture, "Currently is responsible for 25% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, 60% of methane gas emissions and 80% of nitrous oxide," the three leading greenhouse gases.
Also, many ethanol plants are being fueled with coal, a very dirty source of energy, and one whose extraction causes major environmental destruction through practices such as mountain-topping. But coal is cheaper than oil, an incentive to ethanol producers. So the cleaner energy we burn in our cars is created by a dirtier energy in production.
So — many would like to find the simple solution that doesn't change anything radically. But when switching to new energy sources, we need to take into consideration the whole picture in terms of the ecology of the planet, something woefully missing as we developed our insatiable hunger for fossil fuels.
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[…] I have posted before on the debate around ethanol and the fact that it may be dirtier to produce than the greenhouse gas savings at the other end when it becomes fuel for our cars. A friend passed along this article to me, which I pass on to you, from CorpWatch, an organization that keeps watch over corporate behavior and attempts to hold them to account when they do bad things. […]