I am not a fan of ethanol. Because I work in the automotive industry, I have firsthand experience with the effects it has on engines, both small and large. You can read about those effects at this link. The effects I have written about before are all associated with the engines themselves. What I have not focused on before is the effect ethanol has on the environment. I was surprised to see an investigative report from the Associated Press earlier in the week that did just that. I just haven’t had the time to write about it until now.
When I was growing up, corn was something you ate or fed to livestock. It was always one of the staples Dad grew in his garden and it was one of the main ingredients in the grains he fed to his cattle and hogs. Mom always felt cheated if her corn didn’t make enough ears. If there was a big meal at the Jackson house, corn was always on the menu.
As I have progressed in my life to the point of being over 50 years in age, things have changed. We have been told by the federal government that corn should also be used as a fuel supplement for gasoline. The powers that be in Washington felt so strongly about it, they created an entire industry for ethanol production. The effects on the environment, we were told, would be beneficial. Ethanol subsidies were put into action to make sure ethanol production was profitable to farmers and producers. Ethanol mandates were put into place to make sure a certain percentage of the product was used to supplement gasoline. And we were sold a song and dance and bill of goods that is nothing but a load of nonsense. The report from the Associated Press has been attacked by the ethanol industry, but that doesn’t take away from the truths they have exposed.
Huffington Post – With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Mr. Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.
Five million acres of land set aside for conservation – more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined – have vanished on Mr. Obama’s watch.
Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.
Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive.
The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.
Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.
The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.
“They’re raping the land,” said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.
All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.
In some cases, such as its decision to allow wind farms to kill eagles, the administration accepts environmental costs because they pale in comparison to the havoc it believes global warming could ultimately cause.
Ethanol is different.
The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases. That makes the hidden costs even more significant.
The quote I have included is not the full extent of the report. I would urge you to visit the link and read it in its entirety. You should also read the Huffington Post’s report on how the ethanol industry has attacked the Associated Press for their investigation.
Frankly speaking, I have been more than a little harsh on President Obama and his push for green energy. It is on his watch that the ethanol industry has grown with such leaps and bounds, but in all fairness, he isn’t the man who started this push. The report points out that it was President George W. Bush who signed the law into force that required gasoline production to include billions of gallons of ethanol in the mix. As much as I liked Bush, I didn’t agree with many of his policies and his push for ethanol production ranks close to the top of my disagreements with him.
Ethanol was sold to us as a great product. We were told of its properties and how it would allow gasoline to go further. The reality
of ethanol is much different from the stories we were told. I mentioned my firsthand experience in the opening paragraph. Simply put, it takes a greater amount of a higher octane ethanol to produce the same horsepower as a lesser amount of a lower octane gasoline. It just is not as efficient as a good grade of gasoline. And one more thing about ethanol that a lot of people do not realize. I’m not sure of the percentage, but a certain number of automobiles that come into our shop with driveability problems are directly related to the amount of ethanol in the gasoline they are using. Even the engines that are supposedly designed to run on ethanol have trouble handling any fuel that is over 10% ethanol. In other words, it just does not work like we were told it would work.
I would urge you again to read the entire report on how the push for using ethanol has hurt the environment. It is a case of unintended consequences on a massive scale and a prime example of why the federal government should not be involved in so many of the issues they are controlling.
How much longer before we realize that the federal government is not an entity that knows everything. The Obama administration is big on saving the environment through their push for green energy and a green economy. How ironic it is that their push for ethanol production is hurting the environment. I’m not happy about the damage they have done, but the irony of it all is pure sweetness.