The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn’t that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after “solutions” that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America’s future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, “Everything about ethanol is good, good, good.”
This is not just hype — it’s dangerous, delusional bs. Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.
Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world’s oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who is staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.
More at Rollingstone.com
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Who wrote this?…
I thought professional articles couldn’t use the words
“F_ck off”. Haha
My feelings are hurt, I just read the words f$%k off. Just ruined my whole day. lmao….Good story.
Most anti-ethanol articles and sentiments mention the high use of water in production. Surprised they didn’t. Wait, it’s RS. Ohhhh, ok. For a second I thought I was reading a researched short thesis. People in IL and IA have been using ethanol blended gasoline for decades. I suppose a higher octane fuel at a price lower than regular unleaded is just too hard to fathom. I’ve researched and argued for at least a 10% E blend and it’s here. However, I do have to agree that Ethanol’s current hype is political. But of course if one has done any research in alt. fuels we know bio-diesel is the way to go. But I still like Ethanol. (At all stages of production!)
It’s the crass publication Rolling Stone, what do you expect?
Want cheap gas? Conquer the dictatorships of the Middle East, Drill in the Arctic and whereever else there’s oil, and build nuclear plants like crazy.
ethanol will never be cheaper than gas. it just cant happen with our economy.
corn costs too much to grow and it dosent turn out enough. what we need to do is legalize harmless, THC-free hemp and use that for everything… that can make ethanol cheaper than corn and still be used for textiles
WOW editor you posted a article that could get real controverrsial, I sometimes get on a site called gasbuddy.com and this topic gets real heated you think people on here bash each other that site gets even worse.
what this article forgot to mention is the billions that are armed forces spend to secure the oil before it gets to our refineries. I have seen studies that say if the true price of gas was charged to the public it would be more that $10.00 per gallion. but of course this bias reporter didn’t mention this.
“Drill in the Arctic and whereever else there’s oil, and build nuclear plants like crazy.”
glenstapo, are you the biggest moron in the world or what. i’ll tell you what, let’s build a nuclear plant right in your kitchen and you and your family can eat dinner on the table that you put on top of the reactors.
Safer to work in a nuclear plant , than to ride with Ted Kennedy.
what this article forgot to mention is the billions that are armed forces spend to secure the oil before it gets to our refineries
yea… thats part of the cost… ethanol dont have to worry about that, but it makes 1/10 of the power of gas, and corn ethanol cant be produced fast enough to compete with gas. and that makes gas cheaper or the same price as ethanol, with more ethanol needed to = consumption of gas