Can o' corn

I read a little this weekend about biofuels, corn, and related topics this weekend. One interesting story is at

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15635751/ethanol_scam_ethanol_hurts_the_environment_and_is_one_of_americas_biggest_political_boondoggles

The author is Jeff Goodell.

The article quotes Senator Chuck Grassley as saying, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good." But he’s from Iowa. The rest of the article pretty well encapsulates all that I’d heard was bad about it.

A couple of the main points are:

- 20% of the U.S. corn crop already goes to gasoline, but that’s only 3.5% of our gasoline. That doesn’t sound good. Goodell says “Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use.”


-Growing less staple foods here means it will be grown somewhere else, such as South America. To grow more food, they need more farmable land. But some of us sort of like the idea of keeping rain forests intact. Something about global warming or some such.

- The ratio of energy created to energy used for corn ethanol is pretty close to pathetic. 1.3-1 is the ratio given, whereas traditional gasoline is 5-1 and sugar cane is 8-1.

Other articles I found- and it was absolutely amazing how many there were, and how many different problems will DEFINITELY be created by using more corn biofuels- pointed out other problems. They seemed like fairly large problems to me. Here are the two biggies, in my mind.

-Fertilizing more land for more corn will cause much more pollution. A lot of it will run off into the Mississippi and eventually kill a lot of fish in the Gulf of Mexico. I should modify that to say ‘a lot more fish than we’re already killing.’

-Food prices will continue to skyrocket. We eat a lot of corn. If it’s in our fuel tanks, too, that’s more demand, hence higher prices. Most of the meat we eat is fed corn, too. So don’t look for hamburgers to get any cheaper.


Finally, I tried to find some arguments on the pro- side for corn ethanol. I typed the phrase ‘corn ethanol is great for America’ in a Google search. With pathetic results.

The pool of educated, impartial backers of this particular biofuel seems to be rather sparse. I did find a few sites that had great things to say about corn ethanol. They were

-Verasun Energy. Guess what they make? Give up? Corn ethanol.
-Iowacorn.org. Hmm. I wonder why they’d come out in support of such a thing.
-whitehouse.gov. I’m not going to bother to make a wisecrack.
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