These Fuelish Games
“Honey, if you eat that corn, mommy won’t be able to drive to work . . .”
“There is no such thing as a free lunch” is one of the basic truisms of economics. As I started to write what I thought would be an easy post on the problems of using ethanol as an alternative fuel, I found that, when it comes to global warming, not only is the lunch not free but no one can even agree on the price.
The debate on ethanol resembles the overall global warming debate on a smaller scale. Scientists, purporting to measure the same thing, come up with wildly different conclusions. Even scarier, I’ve already come across articles suggesting that a “consensus” on this fledgling topic exists such as this quote from Julia Olmstead on Grist:
“. . . the majority opinion within academia and industry is that ethanol and biodiesel do result in net energy gains. Most skeptics concede that if the balance isn’t positive now, it will be soon.”
And yet, earlier in the article, Julia notes that there are a wide range of estimates regarding the balance required to produce ethanol - anywhere from negative 29% to a positive 67%. (There seems to be even a little bit of spin going on with those figures as a well-known study UC Berkeley professor Tad Patzek concluded ethanol “contains 65 percent less usable energy than is consumed in the process of making it.”)
What isn’t under dispute is that taking land previously devoted to food production and substituting for energy production has driven up the cost of corn and many other agricultural products, resulting in increased hardships on many citizens of developing nations.
Actions have consequences. The balance here is, in my opinion, way out of whack. We’re proposing or actually incurring real present-day costs and hardships for a dubious and uncertain policy goal in the future.
global warming, climate change, biofuel, ethanol, Grist, corn,
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