Op-Ed
Children of the Corn
Brutal Honesty
March 12, 2007 - 1:00amPoliticians are slow to accept reality. With mountains of evidence that humans are changing the climate, the men in power have begun flapping their gums. They’re eager to offset the problems, they’re hoping you’ll let them bet your world on quick fixes. Some hail nukes as magic, and others insist that nothing’s cleaner than coal. Biofuel fans say all our ills can be cured by burning our food. Pain-free, high-tech, and with consequences too distant for them to be held responsible, George Bush and Barack Obama are two huge ethanol cheerleaders.
Because we know that burning oil, coal and gas is causing monstrous problems, but because he’s still paid by oilmen, Bush just visited Brazil to sign an agreement with President Lula to increase ethanol production. Produced from sugar cane and corn, ethanol is refined to “replace” fossil fuels. Obama and Bush say its cleaner than coal, and doesn’t require any meddling in the Middle East, like oil does. But neither will tell you that producing ethanol creates more emissions than oil, and costs a fortune.
Back in reality, almost all fertilizers and pesticides are oil-based, and large-scale agriculture requires huge numbers of tractors and trucks. Converting corn and sugar to ethanol is wildly energy-intensive. Professor Emeritus David Pimental Ph.D. ’51, entomology, has shown that “more fossil energy is still required to produce a liter of ethanol than the energy output in ethanol.” He and others have found that using ethanol requires about 70 percent more energy, usually fossil fuels, than it produces. Producing ethanol results in a net loss of energy, but this isn’t even its worst feature. At the core of any debate on ethanol is a question — what will an oil addict sacrifice to feed his addiction? Because ethanol and most of its biofuel cousins require turning food into fuel, Bush and Obama are trying to make burning food a policy to meet our energy demands.
Leave it to the men who can’t decide when to end the Occupation of Iraq to tell us global warming can be stopped by incinerating food. Large-scale production of ethanol and biofuels requires huge amounts of farmland around the globe to be turned into fuel fields, usually at the expense of small, poor farmers. Monoculture plantations are mechanized, and ethanol farms will sell almost all of their crops to gas-guzzlers. Consequentially, there is less food to eat, and the remaining food is more expensive. And, for Brazilian farmers, food insecurity increases, while jobs vanish. This isn’t a big problem for obese Americans, but it can devastate and starve subsistence farmers around the world. This is not good policy; this is what happens when oil-addicts sacrifice calories for internal combustion engines.
Corn farmers in the Midwest, particularly in Obama’s Illinois, are lobbying the Senator and many others to subsidize them with your money. “Now is the opportunity to get this done — not only for the future of our farmers, the future of our economy and the future of our environment, but to make our country a place that is independent and innovative enough to control its own energy future,” Obama said in a press release. At the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition meeting, he again linked ethanol to national security: “But all we really need to know about the danger of our oil addiction comes directly from the mouths of our enemies.” Paying farmers to turn their crops into biofuels, he thinks, takes a target away from bin Laden, and helps clean the air to reduce climate change.
But biofuels, like carbon trading and offsetting, have huge costs and don’t reduce emissions. And their benefits are distant, if they ever materialize, while their penalties are huge and immediate.
Over 1 in 6 people on our planet is malnourished, and millions die every year from malnutrition-related diseases and food insecurity. Burning corn to drive our cars, instead of using it to feed people isn’t a very responsible strategy. By turning to biofuels, we’ve ranked our fat industries over the nutritional needs of many more skinny people. Senator Obama’s much-repeated affection for “hope” is hollow — the man prioritizes his air conditioning over food! Whether or not that’s his purpose, this is the effect.
The Department of Agriculture predicts that 20 percent of America’s corn crop will be used to produce ethanol, jumping to 25 percent next year. As fewer and fewer ears of corn are available to feed people, prices rise. Since September, corn prices have risen 70 percent in America, with ethanol “the main driver behind the price increase for corn,” according to agriculture economist Marshall Martin at Purdue University.
If hunger weren’t an issue, and if ethanol production weren’t worse than burning oil, we could sign on. Ethanol production has been damned worldwide for appropriating soils and natural resources from poor people to fuel America’s massive consumption. At November’s Kyoto Conference in Nairobi, indigenous groups from around the world condemned biofuel and ethanol production for its role in turning their food-growing land into our gas stations, but Obama and Bush aren’t listening. On Bush’s trip, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused the United States of “substitute[ing] the production of foodstuffs for animals and human beings with the production of foodstuffs for vehicles, to sustain the American way of life.” It’s that simple.
Whatever the projections and estimates, any argument about biofuels and ethanol comes down to simple priorities. We know that 50,000 people die, daily, from hunger. We also know that the U.S. burns almost 20 million barrels of oil everyday. If Americans think it’s in their interest to burn food, instead of oil to keep things as is, it can prioritize burning food before oil. The opportunity cost — is human beings. Ethanol is a very bad idea pushed by liars who hope you’re ignorant to ethanol’s cost and indifferent to the people it starves.
Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be contacted at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.
Ethanol has a positive EROEI
Hello Mr. Purcell,
i want to enhance a bit the bad image of ethanol which is definitively not the right image.
"Biofuel fans say all our ills can be cured by burning our food."
I think it depends on the price for a kilo of wheat if it is still efficient to burn it or to eat it. In my opinion this will be in the not to far future (15-20 years ?) rather a problem for our sophisticated societies than for the people accommodated to rural live.
World grain prices are gowing up => local farmers in the poor countries can now begin to grow grain again to get a sufficient income.
In the last years the rich countries flooded the markets all over the world with their subsidized agricultural products, which were, by this measure even cheaper than the local products!
In the southern state of USA the sun is delivering that much energy on each square mile that you can harvest millions of gallons of all types of vegetable oil! This oil can be used directly in all diesel engines when they are prepared with some little work. This direct use has a lot better EROEI than the use of Biodiesel which is a sort of refined vegetable oil (together with methanol and leach).
Especially on sites which are nowadays regard as dead land like all the desert and savanna like areas.
Geoff Lawton, from the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia (http://www.permaculture.org.au/), did a miracle on a dry salten piece of land directly at the Dead Sea in Jordan ("Greening the Desert": http://www.abc.net.au/northcoast/stories/s727970.htm ). There are a hell of possibilities to enhance the biomass production in dry areas! Even the problems with the diminishing water reserves of the Ogalalla Aquifer can be managed. And green land or forest is always enhancing the circle of water in the atmosphere respectively on the earth.
"But neither will tell you that producing ethanol creates more emissions than oil, and costs a fortune.
Back in reality, almost all fertilizers and pesticides are oil-based, and large-scale agriculture requires huge numbers of tractors and trucks. Converting corn and sugar to ethanol is wildly energy-intensive."
That are a lot of false and old facts!
I'm gathering informations about peak oil since almost four years and since about two years i'm also very interested in everything about agriculture. So i also read something about the study of Pimental (EROEI of Ethanol). Somewhere on my computer i have some documents with more facts :-/
What i remember out of my brain is: For example the figures of the productivity of the corn (?) which Pimental uses for his study are very old and too low. I think in the following forum there are more statements about his study: www.peakoil.com/forum7.htm On www.greencarcongress.com are also some articles about his study.
In Brazil the producer of ethanol are using a very important invention from the agricultural researcher Johanna Doebereiner which discovered that certain bacteria are delivering nitrogen to plants in a sort of symbiosis.
So in Brazil the amount of fertilizer used to grow sugar cane are almost ZERO.
In the most modern plants to produce ethanol, the owners use the fact that Brazil now has a special law that guarantees a certain amount of money for each Kilowatthour that each private producer delivers to the electrical net. So this modern plants can use now the bargasse (the rest of the sugar cane after the sugar is extracted) in modern power plants to burn it for getting heat and electricity which in turn can be used in the plant. The amount of electricity produced is so huge that these plants can produce electricity like other power plants for the public.
So ethanol is not a energy sink but a energy source.
"And, for Brazilian farmers, food insecurity increases, while jobs vanish. "
Yes there are a lot of very big farmes in Brazil which are exploiting the farmes but this is also a consequence of the very low prices which were paid for agricultural products thanks to the subsidized agricultural industry in the industrial countries. The big farmes now have enough power to kick their combattants off the market, even with higer prices for grain, sugar etc. That's not a special problem of the burning of food in our cars.
But this high prices are nevertheless a chance for all small farmers around the world.
Several years ago the World Bank once made Vietnam to a new player on the huge international Coffee Market out of nothing.
The problem was that because of the huge new harvests in Vietnam the price of Coffee went down like in a plane crash. Thousands of small coffee peasants had to give up the plantation of Coffee. Instead a lot of peasants began to plant for example Marihuana and other stuff like that.
Great! Thank you World Bank! That was a fantastic idea!
The best thing one can do for the environment, for all the farmers in his country: Buy local made foods, buy local from small markets. It's usually more fresh, healthier and already or in the near future also cheaper.
Greetings
Stephan Becker from Germany
Some Biofuel links
Excellent post Jeff - a subject that needs to be circulated and driven home. Too many people regard our soil as an everlasting supplier of energy, not realising the reality. According to the recent IPCC report, modern agriculture is the primary cause of global warming. Biofuels, whether produced from crops grown in the U.S. or elsewhere, exacerbate this process exponentially, whilst creating, as you've mentioned, the whole competition-for-food scenario.
We are spending billions in the development of these biofuels, which will only make our environmental and economic problems worse. Imagine if we spent just a fraction of this money on educating individuals and business how to economise and conserve energy? Alas, economists feel the economy must grow or collapse. It's become a monster that must be fed - we've given it everything already, but now we're feeding it our own future.