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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] SPAM-LOW: Livingontheland Digest, Vol 110, Issue 4

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] SPAM-LOW: Livingontheland Digest, Vol 110, Issue 4
  • Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:23:00 -0500


The misguided politics of corn ethanol
Published: September 19, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/news/edethanol.php


Backed by the White House, corn-state governors and solid blocks on both
sides of Congress' partisan divide, the politics of biofuels could hardly
look sunnier. The economics of the American drive to increase ethanol in
the energy supply are more discouraging.
The distortions in agricultural production are startling. Corn prices are
up about 50 percent from last year, while soybean prices are projected to
rise up to 30 percent in the coming year, as farmers have replaced soy with
corn in their fields. The increasing cost of animal feed is raising the
prices of dairy and poultry products.
This is misleading. The price of animal products doesn't rise until farmers stop producing animals because of high costs of corn. The increase in animal products prices right now is mostly due to the distorted low prices we had in the past, and the fact that the processors finally figured out that the cost of processing was going up due to high oil prices and trucking costs, so they raised the price of consumer items. The money we are throwing at China has created increased demand for meats and other high energy products.
This article makes the implication that farmers have some choice about the prices they get for animal products. We haven't seen nuthin' yet.

The economics of corn ethanol have never made much sense. Rather than
importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, the United States
slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. Then the
government provides a tax break of 51 cents a gallon to American ethanol
producers - on top of the generous subsidies that corn growers already
receive under the farm program.
Another misleading and disconnected piece of writing. First, the solution to the energy demand problem is to conserve, not to buy Brazilian ethanol. Second, the corn growers don't get subsidies if the price of corn is above a certain level. High corn prices eliminate subsidies.

Corn-based ethanol also requires a lot of land. An OECD report two years
ago suggested that replacing 10 percent of America's motor fuel with
biofuels would require about a third of the total cropland devoted to
cereals, oilseeds and sugar crops.
The amount of land is not as important as what corn growing DOES TO the land. Depletion of organic matter, contamination with pesticides, monoculture problems with weed timing and the encouragement of mergers and acquisitions that take people away from the land and put bigger machines on the land.
Meanwhile, the environmental benefits are modest. A study published last
year by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated
that after accounting for the energy used to grow the corn and turn it into
ethanol, corn ethanol lowers emissions of greenhouse gases by only 13 percent.
Again, the environmental issue shouldn't be to compare corn ethanol to sugar cane ethanol or to petroleum, but to compare the emissions of wasteful behaviors to conservative behaviors and frugal behaviors. Most of the demand for fuel is for people doing things they don't really need to do, such as drive individual cars to jobs that do nothing for the future of the world. Better to take the money spent on ethanol subsidies and pay people to stay home from their advertising jobs, just as the government used to pay farmers not to grow corn. We have an excess of advertising, so where are the economists to tell us that we should 'weed out' the weak advertisers?
The United States will not meet the dual challenges of reducing global
warming and its dependence on foreign suppliers of energy until it manages
to reduce energy consumption. That should be its main goal.
This should have been the first paragraph of the article; conservation shouldn't be the 'afterthought'.
What's wrong is letting politics - the kind that leads to unnecessary
subsidies, the invasion of natural landscapes best left alone and soaring
food prices that hurt the poor - rather than sound science and sound
economics drive America's energy policy.
Another mistaken thought. Soaring food prices only hurt the dependent poor. They do wonders for the rural poor who grow food. They could do wonders for the urban poor that grow food, also. (http://www.growingpower.org) Cheap food has destroyed our rural middle class that added value to products of the family lands.
"Sound Economics" are local economics; putting producers and consumers together without processors and middlemen and government agencies to loan money for farm expansions and factory buildings and giant manure pits. "Sound Economics" are when a person can live on the value of their labors, without massive Systems of Systems to inflate monetary prices and denigrate their work by replacing people with unnecessary machinery or bureaucracy, all in the false names of Profit and Oversight.

Dan






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