Ethanol from Biomass Represents Net Harm To the Environment
Early on in the development of 2GreenEnergy, I made a series of videos on the pros and cons of various forms of renewable energy. Apparently, someone else thought this was a good idea, and has launched his own series.
Here’s a document from this new batch on the pros and cons of ethanol as fuel.
The problem with reports like these, as I realized when I was doing them myself, is that they tend not to take a stand regarding the bottom line. OK, so there are both beneficial and destructive elements to ethanol. Obviously. But what’s the take-away?
Well, as long as you asked, bioethanol made sense when it was introduced several decades ago, in a time at which the U.S. needed a greater supply of liquid fuels and desperately wanted independence from OPEC. However, in the intervening time, we’ve come to understand that growing biomass containing sugar (crops like corn, sugarcane, barley and wheat) and converting it into fuel has horrific environmental consequences, and simply needs to go away.
In fact, corn ethanol has become the poster child for government bloat and corruption, since a huge voting bloc, i.e., farmers in the Midwest, goes bananas every time anyone suggests removing the subsidies, even though, at this point, it’s abundantly clear that this practice represents considerable net damage to the environment.
The creator of these reports apparently has an issue with sussing out the truth and presenting it openly. I don’t.
Sad but highly predictable behavior by entrenched vested interests (Big Ag). Related: Notice the “Number of Farms and Average Farm Size –
United States: 2009-2016” here: https://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/FarmLandIn/FarmLandIn-02-17-2017.pdf
Craig,
Hey ! great to see you on board at last ! For years I’ve been supporting removing the US corn-ethanol mandate.
The cost of this industry each year in human misery, destruction of the environment, cost to the taxpayer etc, is simply horrendous.
Us corn-ethanol has proved to be many times more environmentally destructive than the fossil fuels it was supposed to replace.
( I agree back in the 1970’s it seemed like a great idea)
End the mandate and start reducing the subsides immediately !
A more proper way to see bio-ethanol is as an agricultural stability tool.
After the dust bowl, part of agricultural management in the U.S. was ensuring that there wasn’t overproduction. Farmers were paid to leave farmland fallow… which farmers – being farmers not economists – didn’t understand.
Another tool for agricultural management was the farm insurance – an extremely heavily subsidized insurance program.
Neither of these programs were popular… the farm communities never understood how much of the insurance was subsidized by the government, and they didn’t like being told to leave some of their land fallow.
With biofuels there can be a different set of tools. This is especially true of cellulosic biofuel refineries. The government could adjust the required renewable energy credits for fuel based on the excess of agrarian production, and use subsidies for produce to keep every acre of farmland from shifting to ethanol-quality corn.
In so doing, you can eliminate the need for forced fallow lands and sharply decrease the subsidies for farm insurance, while maintaining low cost produce for America with stable high profits for farmers.
The only real problem with bio-ethanol is that it is a TOOL, and government action regarding ethanol was treating it as though it is a panacea. As a panacea, it sucks. As a tool, it is a far better tool than what we had before.
Wow, that’s interesting. Thanks.