Guest column: Evidence debunks criticisms of ethanol
Posted by Truth About Trade & Technology
Friday, 14 November 2008
Des Moines Register
November 13, 2008
Craig Cox expressed the opinion in an essay earlier this month that the ethanol industry "wants the EPA to ignore the large amounts of greenhouse gases that will be released if new land is plowed under as biofuel production is ramped up." Nothing is further from the truth.
The biofuels industry as well as biofuels researchers have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to base greenhouse-gas policy on scientifically demonstrable fact rather than recent conjecture raised by critics of biofuels.
Here is the conjecture: If an acre of corn is diverted to fuel production rather than food production, then somewhere in the world people are either going to starve for want of this corn or they are going to start growing their own food crops. This conjecture applies equally well to the diversion of corn for livestock production, which reduces overall food calories available for human consumption by anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent. It also applies to the conversion of farmland to golf courses, parking lots and other urban sprawl (1 million acres per year in the United States alone, according to the American Farm Trust). Yet no United Nations official has labeled these activities as "crimes against humanity," as was recently leveled against fuel ethanol.
The starvation hypothesis is a popular one, but it has been easy to disprove. There is no correlation between world hunger and the amount of U.S. corn available to export. As recent corn-price declines have indicated, there is not even a correlation between the price of food in the supermarket and the price of corn.
Thus, the ethanol critics have turned to the second hypothesis: People in the developing world are finding it profitable to expand agriculture in their own countries rather than depend upon U.S. farmers to feed them. In some progressive circles, this might sound like a good thing - what we in the United States admiringly refer to as self-reliance.
However, the ethanol critics define "expansion of agriculture" as the burning down of rain forests to make way for food crops. Of course, burning old-growth forests would release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This would mitigate some of the good accomplished by the U.S. biofuels industry. However, there is no scientific evidence indicating that deforestation is driven by biofuels production. Whereas the world has lost 500 million acres of rain forest in the past 10 years, the U.S. biofuels industry has diverted less than 20 million acres to ethanol production. Something else is responsible for the epidemic of deforestation.
Clearly, expanding world population plays a role in deforestation. We have 800 million more mouths to feed than we did 10 years ago, and the expanding middle class in the developing world is turning to diets that require more farmland than plant-based diets. However, equally important has been the need to replace farmland that is being lost to soil degradation, which the International Food Policy Institute estimates to be 12 million to 25 million acres every year. The cumulative loss of land for food production due to soil degradation dwarfs the amount lost as a result of present or future grain-ethanol production.
The solution to our loss of rain forests and the resulting emission of greenhouse gases is not to shut down the U.S. biofuels industry, which has played an important role in reducing our dependence on imported petroleum and improving rural economies. The solution is to expand agriculture research and outreach in those parts of the world struggling with loss of farmland due to soil degradation.
Ultimately, we must figure out how to use the solar energy reaching our planet for both sustainable food and fuel production.
This argument is very much flawed. We have hooked corn prices to fuel prices and thus the fall in crude has caused the fall in corn. The fall and rise in grocery prices are not as reactive as commodity prices. Many companies held back the tide of price rises before letting them work into the system and now have to hold them high to make up the losses. The author of the article in the opinion section of the Des Moines Register is a professor working off a grant provided by ethanol companies to promote and expand the use of ethanol. His argument ignores biodiesel as a factor on stealing acres in virgin forest land in the amazon and the indo/malay areas as well.
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