Corn ethanol - still wrong

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Posted on September 19, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Renewable fuels

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

The NY Times got it right today regarding ethanol, editorializing about its real costs – to the environment and to the global food supply. It’s expensive to produce, they write, it distorts agricultural production, drives up the price of food across the globe leading to social unrest, damages natural habitats, requires vast amounts of land, all this while doing little to reduce heat-trapping carbon emissions.

By the way, it won’t do much in the way of weaning us from our foreign oil dependency either. And then there’s the little-mentioned fact that the corn used to produce ethanol comes from genetically modified seeds, an even worse threat to natural habitats and biodiversity necessary for abundant life. Oh, and this: that many ethanol plants are being powered by coal-fired power plants, one of the most damaging and surely the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, as we have said so often on this blog.

But all of this adds up to the real agenda here: the corn-based ethanol industry has created a huge profit-making engine for industrial agriculture and the corporate energy sector. At this point, US commitment to ethanol amounts to a vast government-subsidized program to increase the profits of agribusiness, in partnership with the coal industry. While more of our Earth and our fellow human beings are being harmed, corporations like Archer Daniels Midland are seeing their profits soar. Companies like Monsanto that developed GMO seeds, and then watched as much of the world rejected them in their food supply and in their fields, has now found a way to profit from its research. The coal industry, of course, loves teaming up with the big ethanol producers.

Meanwhile, last year the Environmental Protection Agency, truly an oxymoron under the Bush administration if ever there was one, passed rules relaxing air pollution standards for ethanol production. You see? In order to fight global warming caused by carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, the Bush administration is pushing production of corn ethanol and then allowing it to produce more greenhouse gas pollution — such is the logic of the Bush White House.

You get the idea. This ain’t about benefits for you and me. And it sure ain’t about the welfare of the planet.

Before this goes much further, we have to find ways to obstruct these plans, which means political work. We have to influence Congress and state governments to slow this business down, end the subsidies, and start looking at other alternatives to our energy-guzzling ways – like reducing our energy consumption, like increasing energy efficiency, like directing public monies and tax breaks to alternative energy sources that reduce the harm rather than add to it.

I have included links about the dangers of corn ethanol before. Here is yet another, Corn Ethanol Isn’t the Answer, this time from Co-op America. They do a good job of summing up all that is wrong about with this supposedly renewable energy.


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