“Reducing this nation’s dependence on foreign oil” is nearly as common a political platitude as my other favorites “crossing the aisle” and “fighting the war on terror.” But the politics of energy are of particular interest to me, not surprisingly because of their relationship to food. This column, however, is neither about eating local nor farming practices that can eliminate chemical fertilizers as strategies for reducing the oil addiction (at least not explicitly). Instead, I want to spend some time speaking out against the most popular oil alternative: ethanol.

Ethanol is surrounded in media buzz, and switchgrass is a likely candidate for Time’s person of the year. It burns clean and we don’t need to drill for it in places like the Middle East or Alaska. It is a renewable resource. General Motors is already producing ethanol-capable automobiles. Even our current administration of oil-barons has endorsed the oil-to-ethanol switch. For all these reasons and more, the demand for corn is way up and corn prices are breaking records. That Cheerios™ cost a few pennies more seems a small price to pay for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, no?

No. Given the amount of fossil-fuel-based energy that goes into the production of corn and its subsequent conversion to ethanol, all but the most efficient systems represent a losing proposition. With current technology, ethanol requires more energy to create than it provides. The same is true for nuclear fusion. Scientists and technologists promise that new technologies for ethanol are on the way, but as you step back and take a more global perspective, the problems are more fundamental than can be solved by technological innovation. In order to get ethanol from corn or any other plant, we first need arable land – not just acreage but also viable soil and a consistent source of water. As anyone from the Southwest, Southeast or Midwest US, or for that matter nearly all of Africa can tell you, arable land is hardly on the rise. In order to meet this year’s rise in demand, many farmers had to plow and crop on unused acreage that a US government program had been paying them to conserve as natural terrain. How comfortable can we be with usurping what little arable land is left on this planet for food, planting an energy-crop instead? Cheerios may have only risen in price by a few cents, but in other parts of the world, a corn surplus that once went to international food aid now is filling E-85 capable SUVs.

This is the reason switchgrass is so hotly pursued, not because it’s a superior source of ethanol, but because it can grow in drier places like the prairie where annual food crops cannot. Seems great, right? Before passing judgement, consider that the last time American industry saw economic value in the prairie, the ecological and humanitarian catastrophes we call the dust bowl and the Great Depression were the result. And if Monsanto can successfully sue a Canadian farmer for genetic material on his fields that he did not plant there, imagine the implications when public, natural spaces are dominated with grasses that bear a Monsanto logo and the Round-up™ kill-switch gene.  

Frankly, the Bush administration’s endorsement of ethanol should be taken as a warning. Ethanol bears no potential for making our households and communities any more self reliant. It is a quick-fix – a simple substitution that doesn’t reflect the kind of lifestyle reform that our long-term future on this planet counts on.  In fact the only benefactor of a switch to ethanol would be the international corporations like BP that control its production and distribution. Ethanol is a better moneymaker than oil, not just because it is renewable but more importantly because it can be owned and controlled by big business without interference from OPEC or any other strong foreign influences. Instead, it puts the production of energy in the overburdened hands of some of the most exploited people in the world: agricultural workers. It is marketed to us over other alternative energy sources like wind and solar, not because these are themselves inherently untenable technologies, but because they represent free energy, not renewable energy. Free energy is fundamentally incompatible with our economic system, because it assigns value based on scarcity. BP or Exxon/Mobil can’t charge a household anything for the solar panels they install on their roof, and could never justify charging anywhere close to as much for providing access to wind or geothermal power as they can justify with the complex production process of ethanol.

I am not the first to publicly question the integrity of the ethanol switch, though I may be the first to do so on such a fundamental level. That ethanol is an innovative new technology with promise is certain. But we’re at a rare, opportune moment when people of many different societies and cultures all agree that a completely new paradigm is needed for the way we interact with our environment. Ethanol is not a new paradigm; it’s not even a new idea. It is merely a new ingredient in a very old recipe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 12:31 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Feature Stories, Food, Sustainability, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.