The Corn Ethanol boondoggle
I'm glad to see that Kevin Drum has signed on to the bash corn ethanol club:
As Kevin's post points out, meeting the President's stated goal of replacing 15% of gasoline use with ethanol would require the entire U.S. corn crop be devoted to ethanol production. Not only would that take corn off the super market shelves, it would take all our meats off too, since corn is the feedstock for most of our meat production.
As practically everyone except politicians pandering their way through Iowa knows, corn ethanol is a boondoggle. It doesn't do much to reduce oil use, it doesn't do much for the environment, and it doesn't do much for your food bill. All it does is make corn farmers happy.Unfortunately, I think he's wrong. Most people don't know this, so they nod in ignorant agreement when somebody says we should have more ethanol. We need a little more publicity on this issue.
As Kevin's post points out, meeting the President's stated goal of replacing 15% of gasoline use with ethanol would require the entire U.S. corn crop be devoted to ethanol production. Not only would that take corn off the super market shelves, it would take all our meats off too, since corn is the feedstock for most of our meat production.
posted by walldon | 4:54 PM
1 Comments:
Why should we necessarily believe that the naysayers are right? Just because they are naysayers? There are others who say corn ethanol is actually very energy efficient. Both sides (including Pimental and the Berkeley guy) are probably biased by industry connections -- which doesn't mean either side is wrong. Meanwhile, why should we also assume that the current state of research and development is as it always will be? Seems to me to make a lot of sense to get a nascent industry up-and-running in the expectation that improvements and greater flexibility in crops will come along the way. Experiments are going on with soybeans, too, both as biodiesel and conversion to ethanol. Automobiles destroyed the buggy industry, and brought other problems, too, but look at all the infectious dung it took off the streets. Change happens, and some of the anti-arguments (increasing cost of corn) seem like cheap shots. While one of the arguments is that gas mileage will go down, how come my new cars keep getting better mileage than the previous ones even as the fuel has become 20% ethanol in my region? I don't see a two-or-more-track official mileage rating depending on how much ethanol is in the fuel.
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