Reason TV on the Folly of Turning Food Into Fuel

Reason TV has a video out that touches on several points I've posted on before about corn-based ethanol. If you're a glutton for punishment you can go back and look at them here, here, here, here, here and here. Or you could watch the video:

Via Instapundit)

The Price of Rice....

.....is definitely on the rise. We went to Lee Lee Market, our local Asian grocery store where we do a lot of our shopping today. There is no shortage of rice here but since I last bought a bag of the Double Horse brand Thai jasmine rice that we use, the price has risen from $14.99 for a 25lb bag to $19.99. It was only a month or so ago that I last bought it. The reason there is no shortage here is that the marketplace has curtailed demand by increasing the price. That's OK for me because I can afford the increase but for someone for whom rice is a staple part of his diet, or corn, this is a serious problem.

The solution to this is to reverse the market-distorting government mandates and subsidies that are making it more attractive to turn food into a fuel that very few vehicles can use than it is to make sure people can afford to eat.

Mark Steyn on unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences

(via Tim Blair) I've blogged before on some of the unintended consequences of attempting to "save" the environment. Mark Steyn has an article in the National Review Online that, as usual, puts it into perspective far better than I ever could:

Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S.
added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

And it isn't just the cost of our food that is going up as a result of this idiotic policy. It's the cost of our fuel as well. Read the whole thing of course.

Global Warming - Follow the Money........

....You'll be surprised where the trail leads (unless you're me that is). The New York Times has a good article by John Tierney today about the influence of money in the Great Global Warming Debate (no, it is not over) and how the skeptics are portrayed (unfairly) as "fronts for big oil" or "tools of big corporations." Where the big money is really being made is on the other side of the debate. He also cites the example of the dietary fat wars of the 70's to illustrate the same phenomenon:

".....the money from food companies was trivial compared with the money being doled out by government agencies. One of the researchers who’d supposedly been bought off noted that he’d received $250,000 from the food industry in his career versus $10 million from government agencies — and wondered why this didn’t make him a “tool of government.”

It's working the same way with ethanol and it worked the same way with recycling. Read the whole thing.
(via Instapundit)

Is Ethanol Leading To Higher Gasoline Prices?

The inimitable Vodkapundit, Stephen Green linked to a post by Frank Williams at The Truth About Cars which once again makes the point that corn-based ethanol may be not be the ideal substitute for fossil fuel. He cites a letter to the editor of The Greely Tribune (Colorado) by professor emeritus Don Elliott of UNC:

"As your excellent article "Clouds hover in ethanol skies" in Sunday's Tribune points out, ethanol is less expensive per gallon and emits fewer pollutants than gasoline per gallon. This sounds good; however, per mile driven, ethanol actually costs more and is responsible for more greenhouse gases than gasoline.

The SUV referenced in your article gets 14 mpg on gasoline, but only 10 mpg on E85. Thus, it requires 40 percent more E85 than gasoline to drive the same distance.

For example, each 70 miles driven would require 5 gallons of gasoline versus 7 gallons of E85. Using the $2.67 per gallon for gasoline and $2.09 for E85 referenced in your article, the five gallons of gasoline would cost $13.35, whereas the seven gallons of E85 would cost $14.63 (i.e. 9.6 percent more per mile driven).

Since fossil fuels are currently being used in the production of U.S. corn ethanol, the production and use of one gallon of ethanol emits 16.2 pounds of greenhouse gases compared to 20.4 pounds for gasoline, according to the article "Green Dreams" in the October 2007 National Geographic (p.44).

This also sounds good, but for the SUV example above, the five gallons of gasoline would result in 102 pounds of greenhouse gases, whereas the seven gallons of E85 would result in 117.81 pounds of greenhouse gases (i.e. 15.5 percent more per mile driven).

This, along with the other concerns pointed out in your article, makes one wonder if it is a good idea to ramp up the U.S. production of ethanol unless production methods for corn ethanol can be found that significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions or alternate fuel crops such as switchgrass are used to produce most of the ethanol."

This seems to answer a question I raised in an earlier post about whether the lower energy content of ethanol compared to gasoline would mean you'd just end up burning more of it.

As I've also learned, it may require as much as 1.3 gallons of fossil fuel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. We have been seeing persistently high gas prices lately and oil is hovering around $100 per barrel. We are also seeing higher prices at the grocery store for food as the cost of transporting it has risen and the diversion of corn from the food supply to ethanol production has driven its cost up.

Could the ramp up in ethanol production be what is driving our high fuel prices? For every gallon of gas we are diverting to ethanol production that's a gallon of gas that is not available to satisfy the demand for fuel to put in our tanks, i.e., ethanol production is creating a scarcity of fuel and driving up the price, both at the pump and the wellhead. Ironically, we may be making OPEC even richer, even as we are supposedly trying to become less dependent on foreign oil. Ethanol is a piss-poor substitute for oil if we have to use more of it to produce the ethanol. If we want a good substitute for foreign oil, the best candidate is domestic oil. That means we need to develop ANWR, drill off the coast of Florida and the East and West coasts. The potential for environmental damage is hardly any greater than the actual damage being caused now by corn-based ethanol production.

Update: Added link to Stephen Green's specific post. He just changed his blogging software and I couldn't figure out how to permalink before. It's the actual post title. D'oh!

Still More On The Politics of Corn

This column by Bob Hill from the Louisville Courier-Journal was passed on to me. It's about an upcoming speech by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I read the book earlier this year and it certainly is an eye-opener (as well as really well written) when it comes to the amount of corn and corn by-products in nearly everything we consume. Hill catches several points of Pollan's, one's I've touched on in earlier posts, that certainly bear repeating:

"Pay particular attention to talk about ethanol; the feel-good sound of the corn-based fuel as opposed to its hidden costs; the diversion of corn into subsidized fuel creating a shortage that already is driving up the prices of other food products for consumers and farmers -- especially those feeding corn to pigs and chickens. Pollan also points out ingesting corn really isn't good for cattle.

In "The Omnivore's Dilemma," he makes the point that the government's 51-cents-a-gallon subsidy for ethanol has only encouraged farmers to grow more and more corn for the sake of growing more corn -- all of it requiring more fuel and fertilizer.

The new energy bill requires a six-fold increase in ethanol use by 2022, and yet an Associated Press story said only about 1,000 of the 179,000 gasoline pumps around the country offer E-85 -- an 85 percent ethanol product -- and only about 5 million vehicles can handle it. It's also more expensive than gasoline.

Yes, corn prices have risen recently for farmers, but a New York Times story from Iowa said the ethanol boom may have begun to burst; there's already a surplus; the number of ethanol plants being built exceeds usable demand."

Another cost that the article doesn't mention, at least not directly, is that the increased use of fertilizer to grow more corn has adverse effects as far away as the Gulf of Mexico where every year a zone of oxygen depleted water spanning 5,000 to 8,000 square miles develops and fish and shrimp disappear from the waters. Agricultural runoff that feeds giant algal blooms is believed to be the primary cause of this.

Big Corn is taking the taxpayers for a very expensive ride, raising the costs of what we eat, the fuel we put in our cars, depleting water supplies and it is affecting our health. Taxpayer subsidization of the huge agricultural conglomerates has got to stop. Rational markets (good old-fashioned supply and demand) should drive what farmers produce. If farmers can't make money growing corn they should stop growing corn and grow something there is a demand for.

Big Corn and Rent Seeking - Again

A few months back I posted about "Big Corn" and rent-seeking by the big agricultural conglomerates. Popular Mechanics has just posted an op-ed that provides further evidence that ethanol is not only not a panacea for our dependence on petroleum but may actually end up consuming more energy from petroleum to produce the ethanol than the ethanol itself yields:

"The National Renewable Energy Laboratory states that, “Today, 1 Btu of fossil energy consumed in producing and delivering corn ethanol results in 1.3 Btu of usable energy in your fuel tank.” Even that modest payback may be overstated. Skeptics cite the research of Cornell Uni¬versity professor David Pimentel, who estimates that it takes approximately 1.3 gal. of oil to produce a single gallon of ethanol."

So, why is the Congress so anxious to mandate the use of even more ethanol? The usual reason, of course:

"There’s a simple reason that ethanol is popular with politicians: money. Substituting corn ethanol for a large fraction of the gasoline we burn will mean sluicing gushers of cash from more populated states to politically powerful farm states. And a lot of that cash will wind up in the pockets of the big agribusinesses, like Archer Daniels Midland, that dominate ethanol processing—and whose fat checkbooks wield enormous influence in Washington. "

Washington barely bothers to pretend to hide its endemic corruption any more. Both parties are guilty. How can we change this? I would venture that scrapping the abomination that is McCain-Feingold and replacing it with mandatory publication on the internet of all donations from all sources of any size would open a lot of eyes about who is paying for the best government that money can so easily buy.

Forget Big Oil - What About "Big Corn"?

Here is more evidence (via Instapundit) that the drive to increase the use of biofuels, particularly corn-derived ethanol, may be counter productive. In fact, the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) in producing a gallon of ethanol may be as low as 59% or, turning that around, the energy required to produce the gallon of ethanol is 170% of the energy yielded. That doesn't seem like a particularly sound investment.

"The reason is that producing biofuel is not a "green process". It requires tractors and fertilisers and land, all of which means burning fossil fuels to make "green" fuel. In the case of bioethanol produced from corn – an alternative to oil – "it's essentially a zero-sums game," says Ghislaine Kieffer, programme manager for Latin America at the International Energy Agency in Paris, France."

The push towards producing more energy from renewable sources is really just more rent seeking behavior on the part of the big agricultural conglomerates.

"It is difficult to discuss rent seeking without mentioning the ethanol lobby, in particular the agricultural powerhouse Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). As documented in a Cato Institute Policy Analysis by James Bovard, ADM has perfected the art of rent seeking as well as, if not better than, any other company in America. The agricultural conglomerate has benefited from a range of subsidies, agricultural and otherwise. ADM is "totally immersed" in government programs, according to Archer Daniels Midland’s CEO Dwayne Andreas.

A key component of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments was a set of provisions governing the content of automotive fuels. The amendments required that oxygenates be added to gasoline in cities with high carbon monoxide (CO) levels and that reformulated gasoline be used in cities with high ground-level ozone (smog) levels. Both provisions created opportunities for the use of ethanol, a corn-based alcohol fuel. Ethanol is an oxygenate that can be added to gasoline to reduce CO emissions.

The ethanol lobby, politically supported by midwestern agricultural interests, swung into action. The lobby wanted both provisions to require the maximum amount of oxygenates possible, in order to increase the demand for ethanol. In particular, ethanol interests lobbied for a minimum oxygen content that could not be met by non-ethanol oxygenates. Reducing air pollution quickly became a secondary concern. As one Senate committee report noted, "In the absence of other avenues through which to encourage domestically produced ethanol to enter the fuel stream, this [requirement] is
necessary."

It has been a long time since I took any classes in physics but I seem to recall that the energy required to accelerate a mass X from zero to velocity Y and move it over the distance from A to B is going to be the same, regardless of which fuel you use to provide the energy. If ethanol contains less energy per gallon than straight gasoline, wouldn't you need to burn more of it to provide the necessary energy? If so, where is the energy savings and where is the reduction in carbon emissions? It seems to me that a zero-sum game may be the optimistic case and the authors of the study quoted in the article linked at the top are correct. We would do better to increase the efficiency of fossil fuel use than the false economy of promoting more bio-fuels use.

Related reading here.