Price of corn soars

Share your Thoughts
Posted on February 7, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Renewable fuels

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

This is a bit of a postscript to yesterday’s post on the problems with corn ethanol. I just caught up this morning with yesterday’s NY Times and found an editorial on precisely what we reported yesterday — that the drive to switch from corn for food and feed to corn for ethanol for our vehicles will drive up the cost of corn, affecting prices all along the food and fuel consumption chain.

The editors note that the price of corn has risen to $3.23 a bushel, “which is more than half again what it was a year ago.” The record was $5.545 set in 1996.

The reasons for the price rise are described here, and number one on the list is the demand for corn as a gasoline replacement.

Noting that we have benefited for a long time from cheap food and cheap oil (both industries generously subsidized, by the way), the editors show how much times have changed, overwhelmed by our ever-growing voracious appetite for fuel for our cars, our trucks, our airplanes. And they get it right —

“…we are trying to…gratify those appetites from the same resource: agricultural land.”

This is simply not sustainable and will only serve to acclerate the growing crisis of food shortages in poor countries, the increasing strain on the incomes of lower-income folks in this country, the worsening ecological devastation of our agricultural land, and the growing upheaval in communities of the hungry around the world.

Just how unsustainable is corn ethanol? Here is a terrific 2-page talking-point summary that explains. One of the author’s, Dr. David Pimentel, is a well-known researcher in this area, and you can read another good summary of his position here.

There is no ecologically sustainable solution to our looming energy crisis that does not involve a major reduction in energy consumption. And this will be a huge challenge for a society that built its whole way of life around the availability of cheap and abundant oil.

Comments

Leave a Reply