The Case Against Ethanol

My Dad buys me a subscription to Fly Rod and Reel every year. I like the magazine and i flip through the pictures of big fish, but even though i am a huge fan of fly fishing, i just can't bring myself to read through most of it. I get about 5 other magazines, I am constantly reading one book or another, and usually at the end of the day i like to do something passive like watch one of my DVRed shows instead of reading about fishing a small stream in northern Pennsylvania that i'll never, ever see.

But i was flipping through it this morning over breakfast and this story caught my eye. It's a story, as you'll hopefully read, that talks about how the increase in Ethanol usage will actually be worse for local enviroments than continuing to use fossil fuels, and due to the powerful agricultural lobby, is just as dirty and underhanded in its politics as any of the big oil lobbies. Long term, Ethanol might seem better for our air, and for global warming, but is ruining our topsoils and streams (and in turn ruin our forests, streams, lakes, oceans, underground watertables and killing fish, crustaceans, all the animals that prey on them, and eventually us, etc.) really worth it?

Some good excerpts:
"It all started in 1990 with amendments to the Clean Air Act, revolutionary in that they regulated not just how we burn gasoline but how we make it. In areas out of compliance with air-pollution standards, gasoline had to include at least two percent oxygen-containing chemicals (oxygenates), the better to combust carbon monoxide, toxic hydrocarbons, and smog-producing volatile organic compounds. There were only two choices--ethanol and the petroleum-based methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). This was precisely what the cornbelt had fantasized about and lobbied for. Suddenly the moribund ethanol industry had a future. City air would become breathable. We'd have plenty of fuel. It was going to be a win-win-win.

But instead of cleaning up America, ethanol has added to the mess we're making out of our water and air. Now the Bush Administration has decreed that ethanol replace the far more efficient MTBE as an oxygenate. But with current refining technologies and anti-pollution paraphernalia on motor vehicles there's no need for any oxygenate, a fact the powerful agribusiness lobby doesn't want you to know. Under its withering pressure, Congress and the executive branch have committed the nation to ethanol as both oxygenate and fuel."

and also this one:

"First, no crop grown in the United States consumes and pollutes more water than corn. No method of agriculture uses more insecticides, more herbicides, more nitrogen fertilizer. Needed for the production of one gallon of ethanol are 1,700 gallons of water, mostly in the form of irrigation taken from streams either directly or by snatching the water table out from underneath them. And each gallon of ethanol produces 12 gallons of sewage-like effluent.

Ethanol plants are gross polluters of air and water, and because of the exorbitant price of natural gas some of the new ones will be coal-fired, adding to the already dangerous mercury content of fish. The response of the Bush administration has been a proposal to relax pollution standards for ethanol production. Under the conservation programs of the 1985 Farm Bill and its successors, some farmers are bootstrapping their way toward sustainable agriculture, but corn production still erodes topsoil about 10 times faster than it can accrete.

The toxic, oxygen-swilling stew of nitrates, chemical poisons and dirt excreted from the corn monocultures of our Midwest pollutes the Mississippi River and its tributaries, limiting fish all the way to the Gulf where it creates a bacteria-infested, algae-clogged, anaerobic "Dead Zone" lethal to fish, crustaceans, mollusks and virtually all gill breathers. In some years, depending on seasonal heat and water conditions, the Dead Zone can cover 8,000 square miles. And it's expanding."

It's an intersting read and i'm curious to see what you all think. I know we've all been fed this huge sunny picture about Ethanol, but it's important to realize just how many dollars are being thrown at our politicians and into marketing messages and propaganda campaigns to make us think that it's the magic bullet, when it's anything but.