Corn-based ethanol: the biggest greenwash ever?

Unintended or not, the consequences were predictable

Posted by Tom Philpott at 6:51 AM on 29 Mar 2007

Read more about: business | greenwashing | energy | ethanol

It's hard to imagine what politicians and corporate chiefs are intending to do by crafting a corn-based ethanol boom, beyond rigging public policy (and raiding the public purse) to generate huge private profits.

But whatever their intentions, they're methodically creating environmental and social disasters -- while brazenly brandishing the "green" flag.

Before I go on, let me make two points for the millionth time:

Without extended, ongoing, and financially generous government intervention, no market for corn ethanol would exist.

If ethanol delivers any net energy gain at all over petroleum gasoline, it's razor thin.

Here are some of the consequences -- let's not dignify them with "unintended," since they were so very predictable -- of corn ethanol fever.

-- Urged on by ethanol-inflated corn prices, U.S. farmers are planting the largest corn crop in history, the USDA recently predicted.

The agency expects growers to plant 89 million acres of corn. That's 10 million more than last year, and not since 1946 has corn acreage reached 85 million acres.

Even before the big jump, corn was by far our most widely planted crop -- and growing it required a heavier dose of synthetic fertilizer than any other U.S. crop by a factor of three.

Boosting corn production by nearly 13 percent should chill the spine of any green-minded person, because fertilizer runoff destroys water-borne life from Midwestern streams through the Mississippi clear down to the Gulf of Mexico. It also evaporates in the air, creating a greenhouse gas 310 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

-- In their fever to increase yield to take advantage of high corn prices, farmers are scrambling to plant genetically modified seeds.

Salon recently ran a good analysis of why showering the earth with genetically modified corn seeds, many of them "triple-stacked" (i.e, combining three separate GM traits), could wreak all manner of unpredictable havoc.

Meanwhile, over on Der Spiegel's English-language site, there's a provocative piece on how GM crops with insecticide traits, like Bt corn, may be behind the mysterious bee-colony collapse. So far, evidence is sketchy, but as one concerned scientist, who studied the GM/bee collapse link until research money ran out, tells Der Spiegel:

Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research, and those who are interested don't have the money.

-- Food prices are rising -- and will continue to do so.

I don't have much to add to Clark Williams-Derry's great post on that topic.

But I will say this. Many people will be tempted to hail rising U.S. food prices, which are the world's lowest as a percentage of disposable income and reflect massive costs successfully externalized by the food industry.

But jacking up food prices in an era of stagnant median wages only squeezes low-income people. This is not the way to revalue food in the United States. And price hikes are already roiling the urban poor in places like Mexico. To what end?

-- Land prices are soaring in the Midwest -- squeezing out new farmers who want to grow something besides GM corn. The Christian Science Monitor reports that in some counties in Iowa, land prices have jumped by a third in the last year alone.

Believe it or not, there are young farmers who want to grow, using organic methods, a variety of vegetables for their neighbors to eat, and not genetically modified industrial inputs.

The above-linked CSM article profiles one, and I wrote about the phenomenon in Victual Reality a while back.

But the government-engineered ethanol boom threatens to throttle this socially and environmentally promising trend by pricing such pioneers out of the market.

-- One word: coal. Please. This is insane, possibly criminal, and if you need any more reason to recoil from ethanol's growing coal addiction, please read Jessica Tzerman's beautifully written, quietly angry Gristmill posts on coal-country devastation in Appalachia.

Can anyone think of a bigger, more successful, or more insidious greenwash in history than corn-based ethanol? How are we going to stop this runaway train?

For story: Corn-based ethanol: the biggest greenwash ever?
23 Comments | Post a Comment

Ethanol; A feel good program

I'm with you Tom, ethanol from corn is waste of time and energy. Higher CAFE standards, energy conservation programs of all stripes would be a better expenditure of taxpayer funds, not ADM ethanol subsidies. One point I would like to make is the current cost of grain, let's take corn. I remember corn being $2.50 per bushel in 1975, adjusting for inflation, $4.00 corn is not out of line. Farm commodities in general have really not kept up with inflation, when you factor in the increase in input costs, fuel, fertilizer, machinery and the like, the average farmer works very hard for very little.

by LeadByExample at 7:45 AM on 29 Mar 2007

Maybe we should get together and do

some You Tube ads of our own making fun of the power brokers?

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.j ...

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 8:29 AM on 29 Mar 2007

Got ethanol?

We have a government that does not care about starving poor people, nor civilians blown up by bombs. We have a government that does not care about oil supply, nor the economy. The White House makes history and we follow debating what was while they do what's next.

We know that corn ethanol does nothing for global warming and supplies scant fuel in comparison to the gasoline we use driving alone in huge SUVs.

So what is the purpose of ethanol subsidies? I believe it is only for public information assets, like we also have plenty of "strategic oil reserve", and can make "alternative fuels" from biomass and coal. Why make this public information? I believe it is in public preparation for a wider Middle Eastern war.

We don't need no stinkin' Iranian oil. We have ethanol.

by sunflower at 8:34 AM on 29 Mar 2007

Great post, Tom

I have been working on subsidies for around 20 years now, and in answer to your question, "Can anyone think of a bigger, more successful, or more insidious greenwash in history than corn-based ethanol?", my answer would have to be "NO".

Almost all of the perverse subsidies I have studied have been given to industries in decline, or to prop up agriculture generally. Among the subsidies to coal production, for instance -- a declining industry in Europe -- those that used to be provided by Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK have all but disappeared. Subsidies for building large factory ships to catch fish are pretty bad also, but those are getting rarer, and the WTO is working on new disciplines to sharply curtail them.

What is so striking about the biofuels industry is that it was born subsidized, and like a ravenous teenager (actually, it is close to 30 years old in the USA) it keeps demanding more.

How are we going to stop this runaway train? Well, communication is a start. I have been following press reports on ethanol over the last year, and clearly the tone has changed from treating the rise in ethanol investment and production as a "feel-good" story and extolling venture capitalist investors as national heroes, to interviewing ethanol's growing numbers of doubters and opponents. One can only conclude that members of Congress and the Administration either do not read newspapers or blogs, or simply feel they can ignore the facts.

Finally, in response to LeadByExample, let's put (non-organic) corn farmers into perspective. Yes, for some intense periods during the year they work hard. But do they work harder than restaurant workers, or garbage collectors, or migrant farm laborers? May I politely suggest you read Michael Pollan's recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma for a first-hand account of what that work typically entails.

Let us also not forget that during recent years when corn farmers were receiving $2.50 per bushel in cash, they were also receiving record subsidy checks from the U.S. government -- $9,413,574,771 in 2005. The largest elements of those subsidy checks -- marketing loans and counter-cyclical payments -- were smaller in 2006 (and probably will be in 2007) than they were in 2005 because they are linked to price. But corn farmers, who continue to receive other direct payments, are still doing quite well, thank you.

What the Administration and Congress is not telling the public is that biofuel subsidies -- because they are tied to production and open-ended, and work through tax returns -- are set to swamp whatever new direct farm spending will emerge in the next Farm Bill. John Edwards' recent proposal on ethanol, for example, could end up costing taxpayers $350 billion between now and 2025.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 8:53 AM on 29 Mar 2007

It's All Good...

As I posted in another thread, pulling corn out of the human food chain (because of expense) is a good thing. Corn and corn by products are undigestable. We shouldn't even be feeding it to our livestock.

So, giving the farmers "something to do" is ok by me...so long as we don't have to eat what they make.

I think once we get the corn out of our food supply people in America will start to be a lot healthier -- less obesity and diabetes and so on. Hopefully the price of soda will go through the roof and we won't have 200 pound 10 year olds to deal with any more.

As far as food -- well, right now, most of us don't eat real food -- or food that is processable by the human body. The calories are truly empty because our digestive systems cannot metabolize them.

We could get by on a lot less food -- but food that can actually be converted to energy. We eat so much because our bodies are searching for something to digest -- if we fed ourselves better food, we wouldn't need as much of it.

I'd like to see a lot more smaller farms focused on the "food" and get the agribusiness people to focus on making gasoline.

That will be better for all concerned.

Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

by jabailo at 9:11 AM on 29 Mar 2007

in addition...

increasing corn production not only increases the amount of fertilizer going into streams and rivers but also will undoubtedly lead to more soil erosion. Although soil conservation practices have drastically improved since the beginning of the 20th century, cropland still contributes more erosion than fallow land. There is also a concern that land currently in the conservation reserve program (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/crp/) will not be for long once their contracts come up for renewal. Corn production is just too enticing at this point for farmers to keep land in conservation reserves.

by egbooth at 9:24 AM on 29 Mar 2007

Jabailo,

So spending huge amounts of money on "giving the farmers 'something to do' " is OK by you, no matter how much extra nutrient pollution and soil erosion is generated, sod busted and pesticide applied?

Wouldn't the first-best solution have been to phase out the subsidies that created over-production of corn in the first place, thereby depressing prices and encouraging products such as high fructose corn syrup?

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 10:02 AM on 29 Mar 2007
[ Parent ]

communication

I have been following press reports on ethanol over the last year, and clearly the tone has changed from treating the rise in ethanol investment and production as a "feel-good" story and extolling venture capitalist investors as national heroes, to interviewing ethanol's growing numbers of doubters and opponents. One can only conclude that members of Congress and the Administration either do not read newspapers or blogs, or simply feel they can ignore the facts.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is simply a time-delay effect? I can't believe that Congress, at least, is totally insensitive to this shift in the public/media attitude. (The Presidency does seem to be immune to intrusions from reality; with them, I'll believe just about anything.) But they are going to want to know that this shift implies a sustained changed in attitudes, not just a random excursion, as it were, before they respond. So perhaps next year will bring a shift in policy rhetoric, to match the public discussion, and perhaps a year after that will see an actual change in policy. If that's what's happening, though, then it's extra-important to keep the pressure on.

by GreenEngineer at 11:01 AM on 29 Mar 2007

Aw, shucks

Ron and Greenengineer,
I think you guys might be (to use an immortal bushism) misunderestimating the problem here. The politicians aren't buying the greenwash; they seem to be part of it. I don't see how we can vote our way out of corn ethanol. Obama and HRC and Pelosi are, if anything, more juiced about it than Bush himself. Clearly Edwards is, as Ron points out.

When politicians make noise about opposing ethanol, one wag n the corn lobby is fond of threatening to give them a "corn shucking." Not sure how one "corn shucks" a politician, but it sounds painful and humiliating.

I'm sort of at a loss here. Clearly, mobilizing public opinion is key. But how?

Victual Reality

by Tom Philpott at 12:42 PM on 29 Mar 2007

Why Greenwashing happens

Great post, Tom. I think most wonky enviros are in the camp that corn-based ethanol is a total greenwash. But the fact that this happens--that politicians and businesses and powerful individuals and citizens, when confronted with a problem (global climate change and an energy crisis)--turn to a solution that is, we all agree, simply a different way of doing things the wrong way, is something that, I think, merits a good discussion.

Why is it that corn ethanol has become so popular? Well, for one, the U.S. grows a lot of corn. So, since energy independence is part of the nationalist rhetoric of many advocating for the decrease of the use of foreign oil, corn plays neatly into that ideology. Additionally, as demonstrated so clearly by Michael Pollan among others, our system is set up for corn. And I could go on, but others above and in other posts have covered this very well.

But to move even beyond that and into more systemic issues, it seems that changing the way we do energy, or food, or anything in this country, is often easily co-opted by the path of least resistance, and our tendency to craft systems and markets that continue to ignore many of the externalities that we were already ignoring, while internalizing just a few of these externalities. So in the case of ethanol, we're theoretically internalizing the externality of CO2 emissions, but we still miss all these other externalities, such as the subsidizing of corn, the fertilizers and pesticides that go into its production, or the dead zone in the Gulf. And in the end it is zero-sum, or perhaps even worse.

In the case of organic, which is the case I'm most familiar with, we've internalized some ecological externalities such as fertilizers and pesticides, but been incredibly poor at taking into account the way that labor is completely exploited in the modern agricultural system, and we've also been poor at examining and taking on the problems associated with modern food distribution systems.

This is all related. We tend to follow familiar pathways, and perhaps deviate slightly to, say, reduce emissions at the tailpipe, or reduce ecological harm at the farm level, but in following these pathways, we still ignore so much. And this is not to say that politicians aren't aware of what they are ignoring, or that even organic farmers using energy-dependent distribution systems and migrant labor aren't aware of what they are ignoring, but somehow, they are able to ignore it, because the one thing they've focused on--less CO2 coming out of cars, or less nitrogen in the nation's waters--they've succeeded in changing.

I don't know where all this leads, but I believe it's all connected. Our ability to craft a new type of world and a new social system always seems to run into our lack of ability to deviate too far from the familiar. Of course, hope always lies in the small steps we are always taking toward a different world, but on the larger, policy level, I wonder how this tendency can be addressed?

Stephanie www.stephaniepaigeogburn.com

by Stephanie Paige Ogburn at 1:37 PM on 29 Mar 2007
[ Parent ]

Hope

A number of politicians I've spoken to have acknowledged -- though obviously they can't do so too frankly or openly -- that corn ethanol is no solution. I don't think any politician can afford to take the corn lobby head on, but lots of them are pushing hard on cellulosic ethanol, and lots of them are pushing hard on plug-in hybrids.

My impression -- which I admit my be unduly hopeful -- is that there's more recognition than you'd think behind the scenes that corn ethanol is an interim step at best.

My expectation, which I wrote about briefly here, is that the corn ethanol boom will break down under the weight of its own contradictions. We just need to be ready with alternatives.

grist.org

by David Roberts at 2:14 PM on 29 Mar 2007

H & G

>> methodically creating environmental and social disasters -- while brazenly brandishing the "green" flag....

and so it goes, when y'all run in circles and shout and scream, and no one knows really what is going on... here let me sell you this sky glue, it will fix the problem, LOL

The mental state of the world is pathetic, the physical state of the world is rotting money and the spiritual state of the world is called rip off.

Y'all are aiding and abetting, y'all know the truth don't you. There in lies the lies.

Hoods and gangsters rule, OK

by Zarkov at 3:16 PM on 29 Mar 2007

Don't worry

Soon they won't need corn, and they can tear down those pesky "waste forrests" the forrest service has been holding onto :P

Remember kids, US's #1 export by volume is waste paper.

Why do all that recycling, when we could be burning it?

by GreyFlcn at 4:10 PM on 29 Mar 2007

Life on the farm

What can I hope to learn from the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" that I have not learned in 53 years of living, working, and being around our family farm. My farm land is organically managed and I receive no subsidies, but the 9.4 billion dollars in subsidies you mention in 2005 is $9,400.00 per farmer at 1 million farmers. Farmers survive on subsidies, the vision many city folk have is all farmers are rich, with a new Caddy in the barn, that's rubbish. Many, many farmers have a 2nd job off the farm to pay the bills, you Ron Steenblik, need to spend some time in the country and less time reading books, to provide an accurate assessment of life on the farm.

by LeadByExample at 4:45 PM on 29 Mar 2007
[ Parent ]

Don't worry!

Bush has decided he doesn't like corn based ethanol so much anymore.

He's now redrafted the 2005 renewable fuels bill to be "alternative fuels".

Be happy, we don't have to get fuel from corn.

He now wants the option of getting Ethanol from "clean coal" :)

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/03/bush_administra.h ...

by GreyFlcn at 4:54 PM on 29 Mar 2007

Joy

No more low cost corn being used, no sir!

"In addition to ethanol, alternative fuels under the bill would include biodiesel and motor fuel made from municipal solid waste, natural gas, hydrogen, coal-derived liquid fuels, electricity and other fuels to be determined by the Energy Department."

......carbon......

by GreyFlcn at 5:04 PM on 29 Mar 2007

Finally Tom!!!

You hit the nail on the head. I share your frustration as my favorite- Barack- has gotten suckered into the ethanol madness and the Dems are probably even worse than the Republicans on this one.

The solution? A carbon tax or cap would address this because it would raise all of the inputs into corn production and make corn ethanol uneconomic- this is why we must address the roots of the problem- everything else has too many loose ends.

J.S.

I teach environmental economics and blog at www.voicesofreason.info.

by Jason D Scorse at 8:07 PM on 29 Mar 2007

thank you

Please keep reporting on what is wrong with ethanol and biofuels. All the well-intentioned who are not educating themselves while jumping on the bandwagon will hopefully get the information brought to their attention soon.

Paul's WeBlog http://360.yahoo.com/reynoldseblacas

by reynoldseblacas at 1:25 AM on 30 Mar 2007

Gosh

So we shouldn't let the "free" markets determine which solutions are best afterall? The government ought to step in and decide corn ethanol is not the right alternative? What about cellulosic ethanol?

Hehehey.

It's great to see minds changing without aknowledging their flawed judgements from the past. When you decide cellulosic ethanol is a mistake too, just pretend you never supported it.

And when will you decide that raising taxes is political suicide?

Send out an email alert when serial plugin hybrids with solid oxide fuel cell/microturbine backup generation, large scale wind, and distributed solar generation turns out to be the preffered solution. Thanks.

What a bunch of freemarketeerian jokers. Babbling while the ice melts.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

by amazingdrx at 3:09 AM on 30 Mar 2007

LeadByExample

Ah, so we are exactly the same age. I solute you as an (unsubsidized) organic farmer. But why do you automatically assume I spend no time in rural areas? I lived on a family farm until my eighth birthday, and nowadays get out into the country frequently.

I did not suggest that farmers (certainly not all farmers) "survive on subsidies". But neither can one ignore the tremendously important -- and distorting -- role they play in U.S. (and many other countries') agriculture.

Averages hide the real story. There are many, many fall farmers who produce corn and gain little from the subsidies. But what drives policy are the significant numbers of farms, or farming corporations, receiving $100,000 a year or more in subsidies.

My point was that the story of revenues from producing corn is not just about price.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 8:06 AM on 30 Mar 2007
[ Parent ]

Amazing Dr. X,

What does the current biofuel policy have to do with "free markets"? It is the antithesis of market principles!

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 8:10 AM on 30 Mar 2007
[ Parent ]

Stephanie's Magic Words

Dead Zone. Petro-based dead zone at that. A little bit of systems thinking would go a long way.

by wedjr at 9:31 AM on 30 Mar 2007

U. S. Governement fails

What do we do when our U.S. Government fails? When our Government no longer represents the interest of the people but rather the dictates of Corporate America? We hold a Constitutional Convention and throw the rascals out, update our Constitutional truths, and then everyone will be happy again. How do we organize a Constitutional Convention? Thanks for asking: I spent 15 years writing a Petition of Redress of Grievance, for the purpose of holding a Constitutional Convention. I saw this coming in 1976. lindahawthorne@sbcglobal.net.

Linda95959

by linda95959 at 12:52 PM on 01 Apr 2007

ADVERTISING POLICY

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