Image source.
Environmentalists want to use corn to produce ethanol as an alternative fuel, especially as we run out of fossil fuels. However, there is a growing conflict between the 800 million automobile owners who want to continue driving their vehicles and the poorest 2 billion people in the world who simply wish to stay alive.
"The grain required to fill an SUV tank could feed one person for one year," says Lester R. Brown, a MacArthur "genius grant" winner with impeccable environmental credentials.
As it is, farmers currently do not grow enough food to feed the world's population.
Earth's farmers do not harvest enough corn and grain to feed everyone as it is, he says. In six of the past seven years, world grain production has fallen short of consumption, drawing world grain stocks down to the lowest level in 34 years. As oil prices rise, so does the desire for crop-based fuels such as ethanol. Today the United States uses about 7 percent of the world corn harvest for ethanol, Brown says, "but within the next two years that quantity could double."
I think that we need to rely more on bicycles to get around. Doing so would solve two problems; we would become more physically fit and we would leave the remaining fuel for delivery vehicles. Either that or get a horse.
Cited story.
- Log in to post comments
Bicycling more certainly is a good solution. The hunger pproblem remains, but I agree more with Brown's critics more in that it is more of a distribution problem. The maldistribution of food resoouces becomes more obvious now that international health organizations have recognized that there are more overweight people in the world than undernourished ones.
i've always questioned the availability of viable crop land to produce enough ethanol to fuel all of our automobiles AND feed the world, and i am unconvinced that doing both is even remotely possible. ethanol is not the answer.
Here is an article that you might find interesting it is about making ethanol out of prairie grasses.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6594253
Bio-diesel, another much touted fuel bumps up against the same wall. Plus, there is another dimension to all this - greenhouse gasses. No matter the source, if you are burning carbon, you are still producing carbon dioxide.
The real, long-term future lies in non-carbon burning sources of energy - namely hydrogen. Whether it is fusing hydrogen for electricity or burning it directly in a vehicle, it is a non-poluting, zero greenhouse gas emitting source of energy. Even in a nuclear fusion reactor, the radioactive waste is a small fraction of and far less potent (not to mention, much shorter lived) than the waste products from nuclear fission. Add to that wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric, that is where the future focus should be.
At best, ethanol and bio-deisal are stop-gaps.
Aside from the other good points here, bicycles also take up far less space than cars, which would alleviate some inner city parking problems, and they require far fewer resources to create.
I've often wonder if the way to motivate Americans to be more efficient with their driving is to limit the number of parking spaces large businesses are allowed to have onsite for their employees. Leave it to the businesses to figure out how to make it work (car-pooling incentives, reimbursing mass transit costs, etc.) That would also help alleviate rush hour traffic jams, with its untold waste of time and fuel. We are just too hooked on the idea of driving our cars, by ourselves, everywhere we go, and the HOV (high occupany vehicle) lanes don't seem to be getting the job done.
Corn-based ethanol is such a complex issue. It takes a lot of fossil fuels to grow that corn, if it's grown through normal industrial farming techniques. I'm told it also takes a fair bit of fossil fuel to process that corn into ethanol. Furthermore, I understand that ethanol doesn't deliver as many miles per gallon as, say, diesel or natural gas.
So, taken together these factors might appear to undermine the case for corn-derived ethanol as an energy source.
However, what if farm subsidies are such that excess corn will be grown in the US no matter what the end market happens to be, if any. In that case, maybe fermenting that corn into ethanol is preferable to dumping it on the world market or stockpiling it, or whatever we currently do with the surplus.
Seems to me that corn is just a poor source of ethanol. Good news is that there are a million other, more efficient ways to get it. Bad news is nobody in the US is bothering to invest in them for whatever reason. (I know sugar cane is one apparently very good source, but the tariffs for importing sugar cane are too high to make it viable, and there really isn't a domestic sugar cane industry anymore.)
Politics more than anything else. A number of points to make:
1: corn-based ethanol is about eight times less productive than sugar cane-based ethanol. But we the People have apparently voted ourselves out of that game via the import tarif system, designed to protect and subsidize American corn and sugar growers. We grow no sugar cane. Corn is discarded. At the same time we are paying billions in subsidies to to use the ethanol that only our own corn growers produce. The usual inverted priorities.
2: CO2 is a non-issue. Only CO2 from burning fossil fuels contribute net to the atmospheric load. The CO2 released by burning crop derived ethanol was sequestered by those self-same crops while growing, just a few months before the burning returned the CO2 to the atmosphere. Net zero.
3: Chavez achieved oil independance by amongst other things 20% mandated sugar-cane ethanol blend.
4: 1 gal / year ? Well, sugar cane uses far less land per gal (vertical is used as well as tight horizontal plant spacing). Also typically not land that is good for people food in general. Grows very fast too. Too sensible.
Then again, if it is the cost of production that equates to a year's food, I would like to see the actual world cost (all resources along the complete production chain) for the gasoline we burn today (also include the pollution costs). I would guess they are equivalent.
New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/061127ta_talk_surowiecki) is interesting.
David-
You are correct that the whole Corn-Ethanol thing in the US is pretty much entirely about getting more subsidies to US corn growers, and that sugar cane is far more productive.. however,
CO2 from biofuels is not a non-issue. Fertilizer production uses natural gas and does emit CO2, as does land clearance. If you start to take things like tractor fuel (either diesel powered or a reduction in yield), the returns look worse.
Chavez dosen't have anything to do with ethanol programs (Venezuela is a member of OPEC and has been a major oil exporter since the early 1900s.) You are probably thinking of Brazil, which does have a large scale program of biofuel production (indeed, swathes of the Amazon are being cleared for it), but by far the largest part of Brazil's oil independance is due to the development of the Campos deepwater oil fields, which outweigh ethanol production by a factor of 10.
cellulosic bioethanol production.
the CO2 remains net zero when crop wastes that would have been discarded are used to produce ethanol rather than dedicated crops. Emissions are still produced by farming the original food crop as others have mentioned (aka tractors, processing plants, transportation) but these are not part of the ethanol production itself. The amount of fossil fuels actually used in the whole process is minimal at best.
This method also allows for food agriculture to essentially stay the same, possibly becoming more lucrative with the ability to sell what was once costly to dispose of.
The corn thing is really frustrating to me because I'm from Hawaii originally. That's not a non sequitur, it bears mentioning because during my lifetime the sugar cane industry there, which was previously a huge source of income for the state, suddenly collapsed. Almost overnight, huge fields of sugar cane within view of my home there disappeared and were replaced by fallow swathes of red dirt as far as the eye could see. Along with the sugar cane, all the plantation jobs disappeared as well.
Hawaii could be a tremendous source of domestic sugar-ethanol production, but it never will be, because the Overlords in Congress like corn better.
Why is it stated that Farmers do not grow enough food...
I thought that obesity was more common than malnutrition.
Have you read "Raise Less Corn, More Hell"? It's an interesting look at the agricultural subsidy situation in the United States. ("Guns, Germs, and Steel," which is think is a little overrated but still has some interesting idea raises some points about corn as well.)
Personally, I think corn is a pretty lousy nutrient source for both humans and most animals--sure you could feed a starving third world citizen for a year on corn, but what's the malnutrition like at the end of that year? Corn is protein and vitamin-deficient compared to other grain food sources, and no grain alone is enough to feed the world--as well as an inefficient ethanol source, but I also think ethanol won't save us without a LOT more fuel conservation. That means better public transport and incentive to carpool, because realistically, we're not going to get most of the country on bikes. I spent three years as a college student with a bike, and not only is biking in winter dangerous and miserably cold, but carrying groceries on a bike isn't very practical. That's not even touching the attitude of drivers towards cyclists around here.
Commenter #4 seems top have fallen prey to a common misconception when saying:...
The real, long-term future lies in non-carbon burning sources of energy - namely hydrogen. Whether it is fusing hydrogen for electricity or burning it directly in a vehicle, it is a non-poluting, zero greenhouse gas emitting source of energy."....
Hydrogen is NOT an energy SOURCE,but rather stores energy, as gasoline stores energy (with a higher density). Hydrogen is made from by reforming oil or natural gas, a very polluting and carbondioxide-generating process, or by electrolysis, using electric energy (made by a coal-fired electric power plant? If not that, a natural-gas fired one, or with 5% chance, with hydropower).
Some energy is lost in the transformation electricity->hydrogen->final use in fuel cell); so it is always better to use electric energy directly.
On the main topic, see a January 2007 Scientific American article,
Is Ethanol for the long Haul? for better information.