The U.S. Energy Policy…Starve Yourself

The Wall Street Journal had an excellent editorial on Saturday about the consequences of the ethanol. Sadly, most people who set policy, or the people who vote these clowns into office will not read the article.

Now that the price of corn has risen 80% in one year, Mexico has had to cap the price on tortillas, which have risen 30% in the last year, provoking protests in almost every part of that country. In the U.S., corn is a VERY big part of our food chain. So while we promote the use of a product which is less efficient, and causes more pollution that gasoline. In addition, the rising price of corn impacts nearly ALL of our food prices. As the WSJ editorial points out….

[...]“As for the environmental impact, well, where do we begin? As an oxygenate, ethanol increases the level of nitrous oxides in the atmosphere and thus causes smog. The scientific literature is also divided about whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says ethanol’s net energy output is a marginal improvement of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10 to one.

And because corn-based ethanol is less efficient than ordinary gasoline, using it to fuel cars means you need more gas to drive the same number of miles. This is not exactly a route to “independence” from Mideast, Venezuelan or any other tainted source of oil. Ethanol also cannot be shipped using existing pipelines (being alcohol, it eats the seals), so it must be trucked or sent by barge or train to its thousand-and-one destinations, at least until separate pipelines are built.

Even some environmentalists cry foul. Steve Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells us that intensive, subsidized sugar farming in Brazil–where the use of ethanol is most widespread–has displaced small tenant farmers, many of whom have taken to cutting down and farming land in the Amazon rain forest.

Even some environmentalists cry foul. Steve Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells us that intensive, subsidized sugar farming in Brazil–where the use of ethanol is most widespread–has displaced small tenant farmers, many of whom have taken to cutting down and farming land in the Amazon rain forest.

In the U.S., there is now talk of taking the roughly 40 million acres currently tied up in the Agriculture Department’s conservation reserve and security programs and putting them into production for ethanol-related plants. “The land at risk under this ethanol program is land that’s shown by the USDA to have had great results for the restoration of wildlife,” Mr. Sanderson says, pointing especially to the grasslands of eastern Montana and the Dakotas. Hello ethanol, goodbye bison.

But what about global warming, where ethanol, as a non-fossil fuel, is supposed to make a positive contribution? Actually, it barely makes a dent. Australian researcher Robert Niven finds that the use of ethanol in gasoline–the standard way in which ethanol is currently used–reduces greenhouse gas emissions by no more than 5%. As Messrs. Taylor and Van Doren observe, “employing ethanol to reduce greenhouse gases is fantastically inefficient,” costing as much as 16 times the optimal abatement cost for removing a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.“[...]

Brilliant…we have put people into office who will not only lead to greater pollution but will starve us to death as well. We have got to be the most stupid voters in the world.

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