Earth Equity News

The Ethanol Lobby: Profits vs. Food. By Ed Wallace, BusinessWeek, May 26, 2009. "Last year 17 billion gallons of biofuels were created and used worldwide... Enough food was turned into fuel for our vehicles in 2007 to feed 450 million people for a year. On Apr. 10 this year the Congressional Budget Office published a report saying that 'Higher use of the corn-based fuel additive accounted for about 10% to 15% of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008'... An especially alarming CBO statistic shows another hidden cost of ethanol: Increased food prices could cost Americans $900 million more for food stamps and nutritional programs for children. Growing crops for fuel also carries a serious environmental cost... Studies show that the amount of nitrous oxide released as a result of farming corn or rape for biofuels had been underestimated by a factor of 3 to 5 times. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide... the increased use of fertilizers required by additional corn production due to ethanol will widely increase the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico... The real problem with ethanol is that in spite of the full court press and misinformation campaign put out by the various lobbying groups that insist this is the cure all to our energy problems, the fact is they don't really believe in the product themselves... Nebraska, whose slogan is 'Possibilities… Endless' apparently doesn't feel that way about the state's residents using E85 ethanol. To this day only 58 pumps in the entire state of Nebraska pump E85. These groups sincerely believe in the future for ethanol -- as long as it's someone else forced to buy it... Ethanol can't be put into gasoline pipelines and shipped across the country because of its propensity to attract moisture, so it has to be sent by truck, train, or barge. So don't ship it anywhere... Instead, alter the government mandate so that all ethanol has to be sold as an E85 blend within 75-100 miles of the refinery that made it... If they resist... then we'll know they don't really believe in ethanol."