More Problems With Ethanol As Fuel

Not only do our corn ethanol subsidies cost us a bloody fortune while doing nothing to reduce our oil consumption, it's screwing up our cars too.

Who Needs HIV? We Have Al Gore

As I pondered Earth Day this past week, I couldn’t help but wonder why Barack Obama would sit in the congregation of a pastor who claims that AIDS was created by America to exterminate black people. And I struggle to understand how someone who aspires to the highest political office in the land would keep company with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who believes the same thing.

After all, there is no reason whatsoever for Ronald Reagan’s CIA to cook up some exotic virus that selectively infects and kills Africans when we can accomplish the same thing without any great technological advances. After all, we have an environmentally conscious Congress. And Congress can kill people all around the world with something as mundane as a subsidy.

In the cause of fighting global warming and freeing America from dependence on foreign oil, our Congress created corn-to-ethanol subsidies, a hideously expensive program that accomplishes neither of those goals. And, as an added bonus, the ethanol subsidy has contributed to a dramatic increase in food prices around the world.

Congress recently raised subsidies so that annual ethanol production will rise from 6.5 billion gallons last year to a federally mandated 9 billion gallons this year. Ethanol production consumed nearly a fifth of all the corn grown in this country and the distilleries will use up to 30% of the crop this year. The Senate also set a goal of 36 billion gallons annually by 2022. Considering that one could feed a child for an entire year on the amount of corn required to produce just 11 gallons of ethanol, meeting that goal would require the pointless wastage of enough corn to satisfy the caloric requirements of just about every child on Earth.

According to Investor’s Business Daily, world grain prices have tripled, fertilizer has quadrupled and food prices have jumped 65% so far in 2008. The World Food Program has declared this the worst food crisis since World War II and says that 20 million children are now at risk of starvation. Would you care to guess the skin color of many if not most of those children? Why bother engineering a virus to commit genocide? We’ll just take food out of their mouths and burn it in our cars. On top of that, it takes nearly a gallon of petroleum to produce a gallon of ethanol.

The rush to produce ethanol has exacerbated a Gulf of Mexico dead zone as nitrogen fertilizers used to grow corn run off into the Mississippi River and into the gulf. Those fertilizers feed algal blooms that deplete oxygen and suffocate marine life.

Congress has just finished another round of its Soviet-style show trials, bringing oil company executives up to Capital Hill and forcing them to listen to ignorant harangues. Wouldn’t it be nice if we, the people, could call congressmen before our own tribunal and tell them what we think of the job they’re doing? Enron executives never committed crimes as egregious or costly as those of Congress.

Which brings me back to my original question. Why dream up some silly conspiracy theory about America creating the AIDS virus to kill black people? Why not focus on something as obvious and correctable as ethanol subsidies or DDT bans? Malaria, which was nearly wiped out before DDT was banned, has come back and kills more Africans than AIDS every year.

Perhaps the reason that Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan have to dream up wacky conspiracies to feed their flocks’ paranoia is that their Chosen One, Barack Obama, has favored and voted for ethanol subsidies all along. In fact, he’s the only one of the three presidential candidates left standing who has. Until she declared her candidacy for president, Hillary Clinton sensibly opposed ethanol subsidies. But last year with the Iowa caucuses looming and facing unexpectedly stiff competition, she proposed doubling the subsidy.

John McCain has opposed subsidies all along, although he has lately talked nice about ethanol, telling Iowa corn farmers that it “just makes sense,” which it most certainly does not. But at least he has refrained from voting for ethanol subsidies.

Earth Day is primarily about smug environmentalists celebrating themselves. And so I hope that you are all feeling good about all you’ve accomplished. I’d hate to think that all those children went to bed hungry for nothing.

By the way, Al Gore is laying low for this one. According to the author of the New York Sun article just cited,

"Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article."

Will Anyone Ever Show The Courage To Call Out Big Corn

The US government has dictated that we bur billions of gallons of ethanol in our cars. This has made Iowa corn farmers very rich and everyone else very much poorer, while not improving our energy status one little bit.

An analysis by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggested that replacing even 10% of America's motor fuel with biofuels would require that about a third of all the nation's cropland be devoted to oilseeds, cereals and sugar crops. Achieving the 15% goal would require the entire current U.S. corn crop, which represents a whopping 40% of the world's corn supply.

In the short and medium term, ethanol can do little to affect oil consumption. But the diversion of grain from food to fuel exerts widespread and profound ripple effects on various commodity markets. It has already been catastrophic for the poor around the world.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index, which is based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37% last year, following a 14% increase in 2006. Protests have erupted in Pakistan and Indonesia over wheat and soybean shortages, respectively, and China has imposed price controls on many staple foods.

Keith Bradsher, writing in the New York Times, reveals another outcome of the shortages: "Smugglers have been bidding up prices as they move the (palm) oil from more subsidized markets, like Malaysia's, to less subsidized markets, like Singapore's."

The shortages and rise in the prices of edible oils have had a devastating impact on the nutrition of poor families not only in Asia, but also in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Any sort of shock to yields, such as drought, unseasonably hot or cold weather, pests or disease in the next few years could send food prices further into the stratosphere and cause unprecedented social upheavals.

Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutic, Big Wal-Mart are all enemies, but each actually does good. What does Big Ethanol do for anyone?

Maybe Now We Can Get Rid Of Ethanol

Ethanol has made for good politics in Iowa, but it's terrible for the economy. Nevertheless, politicians continued to hype ethanol as the answer to all out energy and environmental woes.

Except, it's not. In fact, it's far worse for the environment than fossil fuels.

[I]ncredibly, when the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline. In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol "pays back" the carbon released by land-use change. As they say, it's not easy being green.

Maybe now we can start down a more sensible road.