247 ZINE: The Ethanol Debate

THE ETHANOL DEBATE: CLEANER FUEL AT WHAT COST?
By Michaela Cotter Santen

For years we’ve heard about the need to conserve energy, get better gas mileage, and move away from our economy’s oil-rich diet.
But for many of us, seeing was believing—seeing those 1s and 2s on gas station signs replaced by 3s and 4s. Four dollars for a gallon of gas? We’re ready to start conserving.

With the recent ups and downs in gas prices, some Americans are responding with drastic measures—purchasing new hybrid cars or ditching the car completely for bikes and mass transit—and some not so drastic. Checked your tire pressure lately?

But for most of us, getting from Point A to Point B still requires pulling up at the pump. So what if, instead of topping off the tank with fuel made from foreign oil, we could gas and go with fuel made from corn?
Turns out, we already do (at least partly). It’s called ethanol, an alcohol produced from grain that can be blended with gasoline to power cars. And thanks to the Bush Administration’s Renewable Fuels Standard, states are mandated to blend at least 10% of ethanol into all their gasoline. So yes, the car you’re driving today is most likely powered by some amount of ethanol.
In President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, he singled out corn ethanol as a key to reducing greenhouse gas and free the country from foreign oil. 

“Let us build on the work we've done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years,” President Bush said. “When we do that we will have cut our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.”
“To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017—and that is nearly five times the current target,” President Bush said.

So, corn? Sounds simple enough. Use a crop that is readily available, not to mention plentiful in the United States, and use it to power cars. It supports American farmers rather than Arab oil cartels, and is better for the environment. What’s not to like?
Well, according to some researchers on the subject, a lot. To them, the federal government’s ethanol mandate is responsible for rising food prices and does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible or our dependence on foreign oil.

Ethanol comes from a renewable plant source, so it makes sense that the more ethanol we produce, the less foreign oil we’ll need. Right? Wrong, says Oregon State University Professor William Jaeger, who has been studying the pros and cons of ethanol production.

“If we used all of the corn in the country, the net contribution to our energy supply would be one-half of 1% of our fossil fuel energy consumption in a year,” says Professor Jaeger.

"Ethanol is not a silver bullet solution,” says Kristin Brekke of the American Coalition for Ethanol . “But it gets us going down the right road, which is to wean ourselves off fossil fuel and especially from foreign oil.”
But Professor Jaeger disagrees.
“I think a lot of people believe when they put a gallon of ethanol in their car that this is one less gallon of fossil fuel being imported from Saudi Arabia or another OPEC nation, or one less gallon of greenhouse gasses being emitted into the atmosphere…those beliefs are not true”.

In fact, credible evidence suggests that ethanol doesn’t help reduce greenhouse gases at all, it adds to it.
“When you disturb lands there’s an initial release of greenhouse gas. That additional release of greenhouse gas is larger than the beneficial effects of the biofuel. So biofuels are worse for the environment,” says Professor Jaeger.

According to a report  published by the magazine Science, previous studies touting the environmental benefits of ethanol failed to consider the impact of converting forest and grasslands to farmland. Which, with corn prices rising, is exactly what farmers have already begun to do. The study estimates that carbon emissions from these land-use changes actually result in more greenhouse gases—emissions doubling over the next 30 years.

But Kristin Brekke disagrees with those findings’ methodology. “The study published in Science uses a completely hypothetical model that uses numbers for ethanol production far beyond what is called for by the national Renewable Fuels Standard,” says Brekke.
What cannot be debated is that producing ethanol takes energy. A lot of energy. From the water and fertilizer it takes to grow the corn, to the fossil fuels used to process it, ethanol generates just slightly more energy than it takes to make.
And yet, the U.S. Government continues to throw tax dollars at the people who blend ethanol into gasoline.

According to Earth Track, a government subsidy watchdog group, U.S. taxpayers will spend nearly 11 billion dollars in 2008 to encourage ethanol production. 
To begin with, the U.S. federal government gives a 46-cent per gallon subsidy to the people who blend ethanol into gas. It mandates that all states sell the blended gas. And, to discourage outside competition, the federal government has placed a tariff on imported ethanol. That cuts out competition from countries like Brazil, which produces ethanol from sugar, a more plentiful crop than corn.
“Essentially we’ve thrown the kitchen sink at ethanol and I don’t think that was ever justified,” says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

So why is Washington, D.C., so keen to give money to the people who blend ethanol into gas if the finished product is not going to make a dent in our foreign oil consumption, or our environmental impact?
“The U.S. Senate comes to mind,” says Ellis. “You think about agriculture, it has a lot of votes in the Senate. When you think about the farm states, that gets you a lot of support.”

The increase in ethanol consumption may not have cut out our need for foreign oil. It won’t stop the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming. But the ethanol subsidies have had one major impact: rising food prices.
According a study by the Economist magazine in 2007, American’s ethanol subsidies are one of the major causes of the recent spike in food prices: “Biofuels will take a third of America's maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year.”

And feeding people is the biggest trigger in this ethanol debate. Higher corn prices mean that cattle farmers have to pay more to feed their livestock. That affects the price of meat and trickles down throughout the food chain, meaning higher grocery bills for everyone.
In fact, with food prices on the rise, many people in this country are now unable to afford the basic necessities. Food banks have seen a 99% rise in demand for emergency assistance.
According to the Food Research and Action Center, in March 2008, 27.8 million people – an increase of more than 1.5 million people in one year – participated in the federal food stamp program. 
It’s for this reason (and the fact that his state is full of cattle farmers) that Texas Governor Rick Perry, asked the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ethanol into gasoline.  Governor Perry argued that the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed. He asked that the mandate of nine billion gallons required this year be cut in half to 4.5 billion gallons. But with heavy lobbying by corn farmers, carmakers, ethanol and other biofuel producers the Environmental Protection Agency opted in August 2008 to keep the mandates in place.The ethanol industry is now forecast to consume 4 billion bushels of corn this year, while livestock producers are cutting production in the face of rising feed costs.

So where do we go from here? One thing everyone in the ethanol debate can agree on is that corn based ethanol is not the final answer. Cellulosic ethanol, a gas made from switchgrass, wood and other non-edible parts of plants is the biofuel of the future. Naturally, it’s politically correct given that it is not produced from food, but from plant waste. The problem is that we are years from perfecting the technology. In fact, there are no commercial cellulosic ethanol manufacturing facilites anywhere in the world. But Kristin Brekke of the American Coalition of Ethanol says that’s one reason to support corn ethanol today.
“The US ethanol industry is truly just in its infancy. From today’s technology to produce grain-based ethanol will grow tomorrow’s technology to produce cellulosic ethanol,” says Brekke. “But these technologies will not come if there’s no market certainty for domestic ethanol production, which is what these government incentives and trade policies provide.”

But that approach is misguided says OSU’s Professor Jaeger.
“I think it’s often shown to be problematic when government subsidizes a certain product,” says Jaeger.
He believes that government efforts would be better directed toward funding research and development while implementing policies that encourage people to use less gas.
“We would be much better off if we supported other policy tools like a carbon tax and mass transit.”

But for now, Americans can expect a steady diet of corn – at the pump.