Give Ethanol a Chance: The Case for Corn-Based Fuel

By David Morris, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2007.

Working Assets is my long-distance phone company. I love it dearly for its combination of business efficiency, social responsibility and progressive politics.

Each month, my phone bill carries alerts that urge me to take action on a specific issue or two. Recent Citizen Actions suggest the gravity of the issues chosen: "Save Our Constitution," "Impeach Dick Cheney," "Close Guantanamo."

This month Working Assets urged me to "Say No to Ethanol."

How did the use of ethanol end up alongside tyranny and torture as an evil to be conquered?

A couple of years ago, I was waiting my turn to speak to a well-attended California conference on alternative fuels. For this gathering, alternative fuels included natural gas, clean diesel, fossil fueled derived hydrogen, coal-fired electricity, as well as wind energy and biofuels. The leadoff speaker, from the California Energy Commission, spoke warmly about all the alternative fuels under discussion. Except one. When it came to ethanol, he visualized his perspective with the metaphor of a giant hypodermic needle from Midwest corn farmers to California drivers. For him and, I suspect, most of California's state government, ethanol belongs in the same category as heroin.

In the late 1990s, the nation discovered that MTBE, a widely used gasoline additive made of natural gas and petroleum-derived isobutylene was polluting ground water. The environmental community largely defended its continued use and vigorously opposed substituting ethanol. One well-respected New England environmental coalition raised the possibility that ethanol blends could cause fetal alcohol syndrome. Fill up your gas tank with 10 percent ethanol and your baby could be alcoholic, their report warned.

In the last few years, the environmental position has shifted from an attack on ethanol from any source to an attack on corn and corn-derived ethanol. The assault on corn comes from so many directions that sometimes the arguments are wildly contradictory. In an article published in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year Michael Pollan, an excellent and insightful writer, argues that cheap corn is the key to the epidemic of obesity. The same month, Foreign Affairs published an article by two distinguished university professors who argued that the use of ethanol has led to a runup in corn prices that threatens to sentence millions more to starvation.

Ethanol is not a perfect fuel. Corn is far from a perfect fuel crop. We should debate their imperfections. But we should also keep in mind the first law of ecology. "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Tapping into any energy source involves tradeoffs.

Yet when it comes to ethanol, and corn, we accept no tradeoffs. In 30 years in the business of alternative energy, I've never encountered the level of animosity generated by ethanol, not even in the debate about nuclear power. When it comes to ethanol, we seem to apply a different standard than we do when we evaluate other fuels.

When California discovered MTBE in its groundwater, it petitioned the federal government to be allowed to phase out MTBE without using ethanol. It wanted to substitute a 100 percent petroleum-derived fuel. The environmental community was strongly supportive of that request.

I can't but think that the environmental community, as currently constituted, would have supported the use of lead over ethanol as its no-knock additive of choice for gasoline in the early 1920s.

When President George W. Bush first embraced the hydrogen economy, most environmentalists applauded, even though they conceded that for the first 10-20 years, hydrogen would be derived from fossil fuels. Indeed, so eager were they to jump-start hydrogen that Minnesota environmentalists helped enact a bill that defines hydrogen made from natural gas as a renewable fuel.

When it comes to ethanol, reporters appear obligated by some unwritten rule of the profession to talk about whether ethanol uses more energy in the cultivation and processing of the crop than it contains. In the hundreds of interviews I've had with journalists about ethanol over the years, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the net energy issue did not come up.

Articles about hydrogen in the mainstream, or alternative press, on the other hand, rarely talk about net energy. This despite the fact that while the net energy of ethanol may be debated, there is no debate about the energetics of hydrogen. Made from fossil fuels, hydrogen is a net energy loser.

While we're on the net energy issue, a few words about the ubiquitous David Pimentel. No article about ethanol is complete without a negative comment from Pimentel. David is a distinguished professor who believes corn ethanol uses more fossil fuels in its production than it displaces. It's certainly fair to quote him. He is a highly credible source.

But in 2005, a scientific journal published a new study by Pimentel and his collaborator, Tad Patzek. The study concluded that while corn-derived ethanol was a slight net energy loser, the energetics of biodiesel and ethanol made from cellulose were far worse.

The conversation about net energy went on as if nothing new had been added. The enemy was still corn. Pimentel and Patzek's conclusion that other crops were much worse than corn as sources of transportation fuels, was filtered out. My old psychology professor called this process cognitive dissonance. We screen out what doesn't gibe with preconceived notions. We hate corn. We don't hate soybeans or grasses. Therefore the negative things Pimentel and Patzek said about corn we consider authoritative. Their negative comments about soybeans and grasses we ignore.

See more stories tagged with: ethanol, fuel, corn

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minn., and director of its New Rules project.

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