Earth Day Resolution: No Biofuel from Food Crops

This year, we have seen soaring food prices and world food riots. Global warming and increased demand are boosting the cost of our daily bread, as is biofuel production. Once again, President Bush has come down on the wrong side of an environmental issue: his misguided subsidizing of American ethanol production has helped drive up grain prices. Biofuel is a disaster-in-the-works when it comes to feeding the planet. If produced on a large scale from food crops, biofuel will keep transportation costs down for the rich, while many of the planet's poor starve.

Biofuel has a positive role to play, but it will come from its production from agricultural and food waste or from renewable native grasses in areas that are not environmentally sensitive (see Gas, Grass Or...Corn: Nobody Rides For Free).

Contrary to the spin of biofuel advocates like President Bush or Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, biofuel will indeed hasten the destruction of the Amazon rain forest and Brazil's Cerrado (savanna region), along with biodiversity hotspots in other countries. These areas are already being developed rapidly for agricultural production. Biofuel will directly burn up more land there; it will also shift other agriculture and ranching into the rain forest when food crops elsewhere are used to produce ethanol and biodiesel. (See Biofuel Could Eat Brazil's Savannas & Deforest the Amazon).

To be fair, biofuel has its environmental advocates who believe it will help in the fight against global warming. Yet, the destruction of rain forests to produce biofuel will not aid the cause, nor will ethanol production from energy-inefficient crops such as corn. George Soros, Steven Bing, Ron Burkle, Steve Case and other green-minded entrepreneurs who have invested in biofuel production in the Cerrado or Amazon need to re-evaluate the consequences of their actions. Making biofuel (ethanol or biodiesel) from corn, soy, sugar cane, palm oil and other food crops is not a viable long-term solution for our energy needs, nor even an acceptable stop-gap measure.

Comments

[ellenfinkl]

I don't understand the concern about biofuel replacing crops. I live in Iowa and the corn and soybeans here have always gone to feed animals or create high-fructose corn syrup. In 1993, my family drove from Iowa to D.C. and we saw nothing but corn and soybeans all the way through western Pennsylvania. It all seemed like a waste of land to me.

If all of that land went to biofuel, we'd have higher meat prices (and more grass-fed beef), less high-fructose cornsyrup, and a healthier population. It seems like a win-win situation to me.

I must be missing something, because I don't see how biofuel production is replacing food crops. It isn't as far as I can tell.

[burnt]

thanks Chris,

think the support of ethanol production is probably one of the worst directions this country (and the world) could have taken. stay on top of this. best

[TimmySlagle]

Unfortunately, there is so much Government money to be made in Ethanol, that it's going to take YEARS before this happens. Government is too big to turn around in a tunnel and resists change. The Spanish American War tax lasted 100 times longer than the actual War.

Remember this, when you hear any politician pitch another Half Baked solution to Climate Change. The programs proposed will far outlast any scientific "consensus."

[dumboldman]

Cars can run on ethanol, and ethanol can be made from a wide variety of organic feedstocks. But, there are a several big problems with ethanol that must be solved before it will replace oil (gasoline) as a major source of energy. Perhaps the main problem is this.

Gas and water don't mix - so water from rain or from humidity in the air migrate to the bottom of the tank and don't foul up the fuel mixture till the storage tank starts to run dry. But, ethanol, no mater what it's made from, mixes completely with water. No wonder oil companies are eager to mix ethanol with your gas at the station?

[TimmySlagle]

"ethanol can be made from a wide variety of organic feedstocks"

Yes, but if that process is ever made commercially viable, farmland that now hosts grain will be replaced with those feedstocks, and we're back to a food shortage.

Chis is right, Bio-Fuel is a bust.

You can't eat petroleum. Eat food, burn gas