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Food should fuel people, not automobiles

BY CAITLIN KULECI
ASSISTANT EDITOR

By now, most of us are aware of the problems with our nation’s dependence on gasoline. It pollutes the air when combusted in our engines, it pollutes groundwater when it spills onto the ground, and we only have a limited supply, much of which lies beneath countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, none of which can be considered friends of the United States.

But what if I told you that the latest solution touted by businessmen and politicians is worse than gasoline because it pollutes, has more potential to destabilize nations, and, unlike gasoline, is starving people?

Unfortunately, this is the situation today. Here in the United States, and in much of the developing world, we have gone crazy for ethanol. Ethanol is an alcohol-like fuel distilled from plants like sugarcane and corn, and it is being touted as a major step towards ending oil dependency.

Ethanol-mania has reached has reached an outrageous level in the country. In the past couple of years, Congress passed bills mandating that the United States increase its ethanol production exponentially over the next five years. Billionaires like Virgin’s Richard Branson, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla are investing millions in ethanol production.

Proponents of the fuel say this is good because ethanol, when burned, releases fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They point to the economic renaissances occurring throughout the Midwest thanks to increased corn prices and jobs provided by ethanol plants. They talk about freedom from messy foreign entanglements like the war in Iraq, which many believe is being fought over oil.

The problem is that few anticipated the far-reaching, domino-like consequences of a wide-scale ethanol conversion that touches everyone who lives on this planet.

Here are just a few of the ways in which the push towards ethanol impacts us:

1. Your car won’t run as efficiently. In 2006, Consumer Reports drove a car filled with regular gas, and then drove one filled with E85 (which is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent alcohol). They discovered that the car filled with gasoline traveled 35 percent farther than the car filled with E85.

2. There will be more greenhouse gases in the air, not less. In February 2008, two separate research teams published papers in Science that found that whatever gains in the reduction of greenhouses gases are made by the use of ethanol are more than cancelled out by the loss of forests, which act like carbon dioxide sponges for farmland. Last month, journalist Michael Grunwald laid it out in clear, ironic language in Time magazine: We are losing our main protection against global warming in our attempts to curb global warming.

3. Most kinds of ethanol require more energy to produce than we actually get out of them. Scientists David Pimentel and Tad Patzek have published several papers detailing this net energy loss. Basically, we’d be better off burning the corn itself than we are turning it into fuel for our cars.

4. Food is becoming more expensive. The United Nations estimates that the price of grain has increased 42 percent while the price of dairy has shot up 65 percent since 2002. While these prices may not hurt us in the United States (yet), imagine what this means for the world’s poorest people. Violence and unrest is breaking out around the world because people can no longer afford to meet their most basic need to eat. While the global food economy is admittedly complex, and some factors, like drought, are beyond human control, part of it is in our control. As Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute put it: the ethanol industry pits the 800 million people who want to drive against 800 million people who want to eat.

This issue is particularly important this year, as we face a presidential campaign season in which every single candidate is falling over himself or herself to praise ethanol as a solution to our foreign policy troubles and energy issues.

But if we are going to truly address our nation’s—moreover, the world’s—energy problems, it’s going to take sacrifice and hard work. It’s going to require that we be willing to work closer to our homes, give up produce flown year-round from other countries, make investments in public transportation, and start driving tiny little European cars instead of massive SUVs.

But that won’t happen so long as our leaders pretend we can solve our problems by filling our gas tanks with corn instead of gasoline.