Its easy to be smug about opposing ethanol. Critics say:
• If ethanol was so great, it wouldn’t need a subsidy.
• It robs food from the poor to give fuel to the rich
• It takes more energy to make ethanol than it produces
• Ethanol causes more air pollution than gasoline.
• Even if all America’s corn were turned into ethanol, it would only come to 12 percent of the country’s fuel.
There are grains of truth in each of these statements, but this is a complex argument, and each of these statements contains omissions, distortions and inaccuracies. So lets take them in turn …
• It robs food from the poor to give fuel to the rich. Possible, but not yet true, and if we use intelligent regulations, this need not be true.
• It takes more energy to make ethanol than it produces. To arrive at this conclusion, Prof. David Pimentel and others omit the value of distillers grains. According to the USDA, when all inputs are added, the energy benefit of ethanol is 34% or more. This is not necessarily a great result, but its important to remember that the main reason we use ethanol is to blend with gasoline as a non-toxic octane booster. Its also important to note, as does Prof. Bruce Dale, that most of these ethanol energy inputs come from domestic natural gas and not from foreign oil.
• Ethanol causes more air pollution than gasoline. This conclusion is based on one study and, if true, only applies to one category of air pollution – evaporative emissions – in warm weather. It is definitely not true of all emissions. Many air pollution tests have shown that ethanol is less toxic and polluting than gasoline, especially considering the benzene or MTBE additives that would otherwise be in gasoline. Here’s a simple test: ask, which would you prefer to drink? Ethanol, obviously, is far less toxic to the human body than petroleum products.
• Even if all America’s corn were turned into ethanol, it would only come to 12 percent of the country’s fuel. Currently 80 percent of America’s corn is turned into livestock feed. If all the starch were taken out of the livestock feed and turned into ethanol, no livestock would go hungry because the remaining protein – enhanced feed is more than adequate to take care of them. Also its important to recognize that corn ethanol is not intended to substitute all oil, it is blended with gasoline as a safe octane booster.
• Cant be moved in pipelines – Yes, it can, however, most ethanol moves long distances by rail.
According to the critics, politics is the reason for ethanol, particularly the Iowa Primary: “If you are not willing to sacrifice children to the corn god, you will not come out of the Iowa primary with more than one percent of the vote,” says The Cato Institute’s energy “expert,” Jerry Taylor, in a 2007 interview with John Stossel. “Right now the closest thing we have to a state religion today isnt Christianity, it’s corn.”
This is a grotesque misreading of what should be a fact-based discussion about energy and national security. It might just as easily be said that the closest thing we have to a state religion today is the conspicuous worship of moneyed interests by the high priests of the think tanks. But this sort of argument leads nowhere.
The Stossel interview presents an interesting exchange with Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN):
Stossel: You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and we are all Peter and you and the farmers in Indiana are Paul. It’s not fair.
Bayh: You’re currently being robbed to pay sheiks in the Middle East. Doesnt it make more sense to have Middle Western farmers producing America’s fuel?
Other interesting critics of ethanol include:
- Robert Bryce, Yet More Outrages of the Corn Ethanol Scam, Jan. 2010.
- Ed Wallace, The Great Ethanol Scam, Business Week, Sept. 2009
- MZ Jacobson, Effects of ethanol (E85) versus gasoline vehicles
