Archer Daniels Midland is the largest producer of ethanol in the United States. ADM is also ranked as the tenth worst corporate air polluter, on the Toxic 100 list of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. How can this be? I thought corn ethanol would make the greens happy?! What was once considered a solution to pollution, now better represents isolationism through subsidies and a phobia towards the Middle East. But I thought President Bush said in his 2000 campaign, "I would be a free trading president, a president that will work tirelessly to open up markets for agricultural products all over the world. I believe our American farmers can compete so long as the playing field is level" i.e. American cotton!Lester R. Brown is the creator of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute. Maybe he has something better to say about corn ethanol. Here is an excerpt from a previous post:
Lester Brown sees ethanol production as being incredibly wasteful. Fill up your SUV with ethanol, he says, and you're doing nothing for the environment. Moreover, Brown points out that growing ethanol, any kind of ethanol, requires water and that half the world already is pumping more water than they should be. Countries like the U.S. and China are depleting aquifers so rapidly that there won't be enough to grow food, let alone renewable sources of energy. To be sure, he thinks cellulosic ethanol will be part of the solution. But he worries about the rise of corn-based ethanol creating a competition between fuel and food. He advocates gas-electric hybrids powered by wind-generated electricity, and a carbon tax offset by income tax reductions (now being considered in China and Japan).
Here is the latter half of an Associated Press article by H. Josef Hebert via ENN entitled 'Ethanol Won't Solve Energy Problems'.
If every acre of corn were used for ethanol, it would replace only 12.3 percent of the gasoline used in this country, Hill's study said, adding that the energy gains of corn-produced ethanol are only modest and the environmental impacts significant.
As a motor fuel, ethanol from corn produces a modest 25 percent more energy than is consumed -- including from fossil fuels -- in growing the corn, converting it into ethanol and shipping it for use in gasoline.
While often touted as a "green" environmentally friendly fuel, corn-based ethanol's life cycle environmental impacts are mixed at best, the researchers said.
Compared with gasoline, it produces 12 percent less "greenhouse" gasses linked to global warming, according to the study. But the researchers also said it has environmental drawbacks, including "markedly greater" releases of nitrogen, phosphorous and pesticides into waterways as runoff from corn fields. Ethanol, especially at higher concentrations in gasoline, also produces more smog-causing pollutants than gasoline per unit of energy burned, the researchers said.
"There's a lot of green in the money that's going into ethanol, but perhaps not so much green is coming out as far as the environment," said Hill, the lead author, in a telephone interview.
For more information on this topic, I recommend this article by the Wall Street Journal.
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