If you’ve driven through Iowa in the last year like I have, you’ll notice that every available inch of land up to the ditch line is planted with corn. Farmers there have gone whole hog for ethanol production all over the midwest. No surprise, with rising gas prices and the threat of global warming, a “renewable” and clean-burning fuel option (accompanied by a generous government subsidy) like ethanol seems like the answer to a myriad of problems.
But is it? Enviro-Girl spent scads of time trying to uncover the truth about ethanol and she came up with this:
* Ethanol does burn cleaner than gas, in fact it’s been used as a gas additive for years.
* Contrary to popular belief, ethanol production has not significantly added to the food shortage crisis around the world. It’s a factor, but a small one.
* Ethanol can be produced from corn, but it can also come from hemp, switchgrass, sugar cane and other cellulose fibers.
* Ethanol is very unstable and difficult to transport.
* While some ethanol refineries leave a huge carbon footprint, many have become quite clean and rely on renewable energy.
* Corn, on the other hand, consumes a lot of energy as a crop–it’s high-maintenance, strips soil of its nutrients, in turn requiring a lot of fertilizer AND requires a lot of fuel to grow and harvest. Corn, whether grown for food or fuel, costs $347 an acre–this doesn’t account for the costs associated with soil erosion, irrigation, or processing.
* Planting cornfields across America’s heartland will not only destroy biodiversity crucial to the environment’s health, the fertilizer runoff and field erosion causes its own problems comparable to gas emissions.
* A car requires more ethanol than regular gasoline because ethanol doesn’t have the same “energy output.”
* Corn has been heavily subsidized as a crop for decades. Increasing a market for ethanol will only increase the current $1 billion in federal and state subsidies. (Hint: A subsidy is taxpayer money allocated somewhere. A subsidy is OUR money, people!!!)
When the total cost of ethanol is added up, Enviro-Girl concludes that ethanol is NOT the solution to our fuel problems. Even Enviro-Girl’s father, who works in the trucking business and is a die-hard Republican, thinks ethanol is a ridiculous proposition. She’d rather see truly renewable resources used to propel her kids to soccer practice (solar, wind, even a more efficient public transport system or bicycles). She read the pros and cons and offers you a variety of viewpoints on the subject to consider :
An agricultural expert’s perspective
