Green Daily

The loudest voices pushing the idea that ethanol starves people have come from Hugo Chavez (a petro tyrant) and a prominent DC-based PR firm hired by the United Arab Emirates. Please don't be fooled.

The reality is that corn ethanol is no threat to food at all.

Ethanol corn has the starch taken out to make ethanol, but the vitamins, minerals, protein, etc., remain and go into animal feed for meat livestock. So it all ends up on our plates anyway.

Even if that weren't true, we can easily see whether increased ethanol corn production has cut into food corn production- it hasn't. Despite the significant rise in ethanol corn production in the last several years, more food corn than ever has been raised too, NOT less. Same with other staple crops such as soybeans.

Only a tiny fraction of the cost of a box of corn flakes comes from the corn - the rest is affected at every step along the way by the cost of fuel and fertilizer, which comes from petroleum. By helping reduce the price of oil, ethanol is LOWERING, not increasing food prices.

Furthermore the myth of taking away food farmland is also false. Only one half of arable land in the US is farmland and well under one half of THAT is even cultivated. So there's tons of room for expansion. IN fact with E10 being a standard, we're supplying up to 10% of our transportation fuel needs already on a hair over 1% of our arable land as it is.

And that's without tapping methanol, which can be made from any biomass without exception including crop residues, such as stems, leaves, etc., today, with no further research necessary. Not to mention weeds (such as those which clog waterways and are removed anyway), lawn clippings, raked leaves, trash, even sewage.

Nor is the quantity of farmland is fixed. Per acre production yields are constantly rising - up 17% since 2002 alone, and Iowa now puts out more corn than the entire country did in the 1940s.

Even with all that it's unlikely we can fuel ourselves with only what we produce here. And that's a good thing. There are dozens of desperately poor countries eager to find a cash crop to develop and sell other than drugs. We can lecture them about sustainable practices all we want but unless they an incentive and a market to reach why would they listen? This is how to feed the poor and improve their environmental practices too.

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On the issue of gasoline vs. ethanol when it comes to the environment, it's not even close.

Firstly, all ethanol comes from plants, and thus its CO2 is already part of the carbon cycle. Ethanol's CO2 emissions do not put any CO2 into the atmosphere that would not otherwise have been there. That's pretty much the definition of carbon neutrality.

By contrast, all petroleum products pull up CO2 that has been sequestered far underground forever in human terms. By burning petroleum, we are throwing more, new, extra CO2 into the atmosphere.

Secondly, ethanol produces far less NOx than gasoline. NOx is a major contributor to acid rain and ozone smog. Furthermore, when it comes to escaped fuel vapors (from imperfect combustion, leaks from fuel stations, etc.) alcohol fuel (such as ethanol) is less than a TENTH as reactive to NOx as gasoline vapor is, further reducing its effect. On top of that, alcohol vapor is easily washed out of the atmosphere by rain, unlike gasoline vapor, helping further prevent ozone smog.

Thirdly, alcohol emits ZERO sulfur (another cause of acid rain), while gasoline is a major source of it.

Fourthly, while gasoline is riddled with carcinogens and mutagens such as benzene, toluene, xylene, ethyl benzene, and n-hexane, neither ethanol nor methanol have ANY of them, and are not carcinogenic or mutagenic.

Fifthly, while petroleum and its derivatives do not dissolve in water and thus remain concentrated and localized, alcohol dissolves readily in water (which is why it's useful for delicious drinks - did I mention ethanol is non-toxic?). Thus alcohol just dissolves into the vast hydrosphere.

Sixthly, even if alcohol didn't do that, leaks would be no problem because unlike petroleum products alcohol is readily biodegradable and breaks down within a day if not hours into harmless components. What an enormous difference! The Exxon Valdez is still killing wildlife to this day as sea otters eat contaminated shellfish. If it had been carrying alcohol fuel, the impact would have been over within a day at most.

Finally (for now) alcohol fuels when burned produce NO PARTICULATE MATTER, NO SMOKE, NO SOOT. This is incredibly huge. We're all familiar with the sickening black snow at roadsides from car exhausts, the disgusting smog haze hanging over Los Angeles and Beijing and Mexico City, etc. With alcohol an enormous contributor to that goes away.

Environmentalists need to remember their history and ease up from the recently ingrained suspicion of new technology. It was THEY who invented flex fuel cars, and championed methanol cars before them, primarily to fight pollution. Alcohol fuel is a green baby and is the most economical, practical, effective way to transition away from filthy, economy-wrecking, crazy-funding oil.

Don't let oil cartel FUD stampede the green movement away from alcohol.

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