Politicians 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.