Whether they will admit it or not, everyone has known for a few years now that America (and the world) must find an alternative for fossil fuels. One of the biggest uses of fossil fuels is the gasoline that powers our automobiles.
Recently there has been a push to replace much of the gasoline with ethanol derived from corn. The rising price of oil has made ethanol very feasible. In addition, ethanol burns much cleaner and therefore produces less damaging pollution.
It sounded like a great solution. I have to admit, it even sounded good to me. Last year the United States produced 6.5 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol. But in 2007, a new energy bill up the ceiling to 15 billion gallons. It sounded like a win-win situation. Farmers get a new market for corn, and consumers get a cleaner burning fuel.
But there was an aspect that was not considered. What would it do to the food supply? The first person to express doubts was Fidel Castro. Months ago, Castro warned that this would add to world food shortages -- especially in third-world countries. But Castro is not well-liked in this country, so no one listened.
Now it looks like he could have been right. But the effect is not being felt only in third-world countries. Food prices are rising everywhere. The 6.5 billion gallons produced last year did not reduce exports of corn (for food and feed) last year, but it did contribute to rising prices because their was less corn available for bidding on.
Imagine what production of 15 billion gallons will do (and even that is only a fraction of what would be needed if we were serious about replacing gasoline).The more ethanol we produce from corn, the more the price of corn will rise -- both food and feed corn.
When food corn rises in price, it creates more demand for other grains and their price also begins to rise. When feed corn rises in price, it will also drive up the price of meat. As the prices rise, the third-world cannot buy as much and shortages will be larger. The rest of us will feel the rise in prices when we go grocery shopping.
Now this is not the only factor in the rising food prices. Higher energy costs, droughts, and the rising consumption of meat and dairy foods in many places (like China) are also contributing factors. But the production of corn-based ethanol is becoming a major factor.
Maybe it's time to rethink food-based ethanol. While those who came up with the idea didn't take it to its logical conclusion, the marketplace certainly did. If ethanol is to be a real alternative, it must be made from non-food sources.
The problem is that if you grow something to turn into ethanol, you cannot grow food crops on that land at the same time. Some folks have championed cellulose-derived ethanol made from plant wastes that currently are just turned under in the fields, but the problem is that turning those plant wastes under in the fields is how you keep your soil friable, if you don't do that, the soil turns hard and bitter and useless. Other folks have advocated using marginal lands (those not suited for food production) for cellulose crops, but thing is, the reason those lands are marginal don't go away when you try to use them for any other kind of crops -- they still don't have enough water, are still too rugged or too salty or whatever, so any crops you try to grow there won't grow well or will present problems with planting and harvesting.
ReplyDeleteThe fact of the matter is that we simply cannot get enough energy from plant matter to keep a modern industrial infrastructure going, regardless of what we turn to. Plants are too poor a transformer of sunlight into energy, and it's too difficult to turn the sugars that plants produce from sunlight into something that is usable in an internal combustion engine. This implies that we have to turn to something with a higher energy density in order to handle the transportation needs of a modern technological society, which is where the "hydrogen superhighway" hooked up to wind farms, solar farms, and giant nuclear plants to electrolyze water into hydrogen comes into play.
Like you, I think ethanol from corn is a dead end. Unlike you, I've known this for quite some time, because I worked the numbers and realized that even if we planted every available patch of land we still wouldn't have enough farmland to substitute ethanol for all of the petrofuels we currently use. That's one reason why the innumeracy of the average American worries me so much. If you do not understand mathematics, you do not have a language that accurately describes reality, and without a language that accurately describes reality, you end up with stupidity like the Bush Administration -- and ethanol from corn.
- Badtux the Numeracy Penguin