permaculture

[Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net>]

Green Fuel's Dirty Secret
   By Sasha Lilley
   CorpWatch

   Thursday 01 June 2006

   The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a "City of Power and 
Progress." If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be 
partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When 
burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the 
greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

   Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based 
petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and 
President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. The agribusiness 
giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the largest US producer of 
ethanol, which it makes by distilling corn. ADM also operates coal-fired 
plants at its company base in Decatur, Illinois, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 
and is currently adding another coal-powered facility at its Clinton, 
Iowa ethanol plant.

   That's not all. "[Ethanol] plants themselves - not even the part 
producing the energy - produce a lot of air pollution," says Mike Ewall, 
director of the Energy Justice Network. "The EPA (US Environmental 
Protection Agency) has cracked down in recent years on a lot of 
Midwestern ethanol plants for excessive levels of carbon monoxide, 
methanol, toluene, and volatile organic compounds, some of which are 
known to cause cancer."

   A single ADM corn processing plant in Clinton, Iowa generated nearly 
20,000 tons of pollutants including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and 
volatile organic compounds in 2004, according to federal records. The 
EPA considers an ethanol plant as a "major source" of pollution if it 
produces more than 100 tons of any one pollutant per year, although it 
has recently proposed increasing that cap to 250 tons.

   Sulfur dioxide is classified by the EPA as a contributor to 
respiratory and heart disease and the generation of acid rain. Nitrogen 
oxides produce ozone and a wide variety of toxic chemicals as well as 
contributing to global warming, according to the EPA, while many 
volatile organic compounds are cancer-causing. Last year, Environmental 
Defense, a national environmental group, ranked the Clinton plant as the 
26th largest emitter of carcinogenic compounds in the US.

   For years, ADM promoted itself as the "supermarket to the world" on 
major US radio and television networks like NPR, CBS, NBC, and PBS where 
it underwrites influential programs such as the NewsHour with Jim 
Lehrer. Now, as it actively promotes its ethanol business, ADM has 
rolled out its new eco-friendly slogan, "Resourceful by Nature" which 
"reinforces our role as an essential link between farmers and consumers."

   Despite the company's attempts at green packaging, ADM is ranked as 
the tenth worst corporate air polluter, on the "Toxic 100" list of the 
Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. 
The Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency has 
charged the company with violations of the Clean Air Act in hundreds of 
processing units, covering 52 plants in 16 states. In 2003 the two 
agencies reached a $351 million settlement with the company. Three years 
earlier, ADM was fined $1.5 million by the Department of Justice and 
$1.1 million by the State of Illinois for pollution related to ethanol 
production and distribution. Currently, the corporation is involved in 
approximately 25 administrative and judicial proceedings connected to 
federal and state Superfund laws regarding the environmental clean-up of 
sites contaminated by ADM operations.

   Friends in High Places

   Environmentalists have cried foul, but they are up against the 56th 
largest company in the United States, as ranked by revenue in Fortune 
Magazine. ADM has more than 25,000 employees, net sales last year of 
$35.9 billion, with $1 billion in profits, as well as a recent 29 
percent profit increase in the last quarter. The company is a global 
force: ADM is one of the world's biggest processors of soybeans, corn, 
wheat, and cocoa, which it buys from growers in the US and around the 
world. The company recently hired Patricia A. Woertz, an executive vice 
president of Chevron Corporation, as its chief executive officer.

   ADM has another resource at its disposal, the considerable clout it 
has built up over decades of courting and lobbying Washington's power 
brokers. Days after the company's February expansion announcement of the 
coal-fired Nebraska plant, US Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman visited 
ADM's Decatur headquarters to tout its part in President Bush's Biofuels 
Initiative. The secretary posed for photos with then ADM Chair G. Allen 
Andreas and announced that the Department of Energy would offer up to 
$160 million for the construction of three biorefineries to expand US 
ethanol production.

   "Partnerships with industry like these will lead to new innovation 
and discovery that will usher in an era of reduced dependence on foreign 
sources of oil, while strengthening our economy at home," Secretary 
Bodman said from ADM's trade floor. Like the ADM ethanol plant in 
Columbus, the three biorefineries could well be partially coal-powered, 
given the absence of conditions imposed by the Department of Energy.

   "It's been some 30 years since we got a call from the White House 
asking for the agricultural industry, ADM in particular, to take a 
serious look at the possibilities of building facilities to produce 
alternative sources of energy for our fuel supply in the United States," 
said Allen Andreas, who was chair, chief executive and president of ADM 
at the time of Secretary Bodman's visit. "We are delighted to 
participate in any way that we can in the president's programs."

   ADM and its signature project have never lacked friends in high 
places, despite a history of price fixing scandals and monopolistic 
misdeeds. The Andreas family, which has headed up the publicly-traded 
company for decades, has cultivated bipartisan support through generous 
donations to both Republicans and Democrats. Since the 2000 election 
cycle, ADM has given more than $3 million in political contributions, 
according to the Center for Responsive Politics: $1.2 million to 
Democrats and $1.85 million to Republicans. These donations may have 
helped sustain a multitude of government subsidies to ADM, including 
ethanol tax credits, tariffs against foreign ethanol competitors, and 
federally mandated ethanol additive standards.

   Politicians from the Midwestern Corn Belt are some of the company's 
staunchest allies. Senators Richard Durbin, Charles Grassley, and Tom 
Harkin, and Representative Dick Gephardt have consistently supported 
lavish federal tax subsidies to ethanol producers, for which ADM is the 
prime beneficiary. All are recipients of political action committee 
donations from the agribusiness behemoth. The Wall Street Journal has 
referred to the former South Dakota senator and Senate minority leader 
as "Archer Daschle Midland," because of his unswerving support for the 
interests of the company.

   ADM's political heft was behind the 54 cent per gallon tariff that 
the US government has imposed on imports of sugar-cane based ethanol 
from Brazil, which is cheaper than ADM's corn-based fuel. The tariff 
dates back to 1980 when the CEO of ADM convinced President Carter to 
adopt it, according to former ADM lobbyist Joseph Karth. Iowa's Senator 
Grassley recently stated his intention to block any attempt to remove 
the tariff on lower-cost Brazilian fuel in the face of rising gas 
prices, stating that "lifting this tariff would be counter-productive to 
the widely supported goal of promoting home-grown renewable sources of 
energy."

   Over many decades, the company has been the recipient of government 
largesse in the form of federal and state corn and ethanol subsidies 
that have totaled billions of dollars, prompting the libertarian Cato 
Institute to declare ADM the biggest recipient of corporate welfare in 
the US in 1995. ADM has been a prime beneficiary of the federal tax 
credit on ethanol, which the refiner can apply to the tax it pays on 
corporate income. First implemented in 1978, the tax credit currently 
stands at 51 cents per gallon of ethanol sold. The Government Accounting 
Office estimates the subsidies to the ethanol industry from 1980-2000 at 
$11 billion. As the biggest ethanol producer in the US, ADM has received 
the largest portion of the government's generosity.

   Recent legislation has further greased the tracks of the ethanol 
gravy train. The Energy Policy Act of 2005's Renewable Fuel Standard 
stipulates that gasoline sold in the US must include a certain 
percentage of ethanol or biodiesel, starting at 4 billion gallons this 
year and rising to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. ADM got another boost 
when the federal government mandated that oil companies replace MTBE, a 
cancer-causing gasoline additive, with ethanol. 45 states have adopted 
policies to encourage the production and use of the fuel. ADM has 
responded with plans to increase its output of ethanol by 42 percent 
over the next three years.

   When Corn Is King

   Subsidies and tax incentives might make public policy sense - even 
when they flow into the coffers of a Fortune 500 company with 
mega-profits - but only if corn ethanol delivers on the promise that its 
boosters claim: to significantly cut greenhouse emissions, protect the 
environment, and slow global warming.

   Debate has raged for years over whether ethanol made from corn 
generates more energy than the amount of fossil fuel that is used to 
produce it. UC Berkeley's Alexander Farrell recently co-authored a 
comprehensive study, published in Science, on the energy and greenhouse 
gas output of various sources of ethanol. His group found that corn 
ethanol reduces greenhouse gases by only 13 percent, which compares 
unfavorably with ethanol made from vegetable cellulose such as 
switchgrass. "Our best guess," says Farrell, "is that using corn ethanol 
today results in a modest decline of greenhouse gas emissions."

   Yet the enormous amounts of corn that ADM and other ethanol 
processors buy from Midwestern farmers wreak damage on the environment 
in a multiplicity of ways. Modern corn hybrids require more nitrogen 
fertilizer, herbicides, and insecticides than any other crop, while 
causing the most extensive erosion of top soil. Pesticide and fertilizer 
runoff from the vast expanses of corn in the US prairies bleed into 
groundwater and rivers as far as the Gulf of Mexico. The nitrogen runoff 
flowing into the Mississippi River has fostered a vast bloom of dead 
algae in the Gulf that starves fish and other aquatic life of oxygen.

   To understand the hidden costs of corn-based ethanol requires 
factoring in "the huge, monstrous costs of cleaning up polluted water in 
the Mississippi River drainage basin and also trying to remedy the 
negative effects of poisoning the Gulf of Mexico," says Tad Patzek of 
the University of California's Civil and Environmental Engineering 
department.

   "These are not abstract environmental effects," Patzek asserts, 
"these are effects that impact the drinking water all over the Corn 
Belt, that impact also the poison that people ingest when they eat their 
food, from the various pesticides and herbicides." Corn farming 
substantially tops all crops in total application of pesticides, 
according to the US Department of Agriculture, and is the crop most 
likely to leach pesticides into drinking water.

   While banned by the European Union, atrazine is the most heavily 
used herbicide in the United States - primarily applied to cornfields - 
and the EPA rates it as the second most common pesticide in drinking 
wells. The EPA has set maximum safe levels of atrazine in drinking water 
at 3 parts per billion, but scientists with the US Geological Survey 
have found up to 224 parts per billion in Midwestern streams and 2,300 
parts per billion in Corn Belt irrigation reservoirs.

   Then there is the question of how practical it is to replace 
petroleum with corn-based ethanol. "There are conflicting figures on how 
much land would be needed to meet all of our petroleum demand from 
ethanol," says Energy Justice Network's Ewall, "and those range from 
some portion of what we currently have as available crop land to as much 
as five times as the amount of crop land in the US." The Department of 
Agriculture estimates that the Corn Belt has lost 90 percent of its 
original wetlands, two thirds of which has taken place since draining 
for agriculture began mid-century.

   "No one who's looked at this issue [from an environmental 
perspective] talks about using corn kernels as the only, or even major 
component, of the long term solution," counters Nathanael Greene, senior 
policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Everyone 
assumes we'll evolve the industry from its current technology to the 
advanced technologies."

   If that happens, it will be a marked reversal of many decades of 
government policy in support of Archer Daniels Midland - and the company 
may well wonder what it's getting for its unceasingly ample gifts to 
both political parties. But with the "full-throated support of the Bush 
Administration", in the words of the Renewable Fuels Association, a corn 
ethanol-dominated, ADM-led trade group, that day doesn't seem to be 
approaching any time soon.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Fueling Exploitation: ADM in Brazil and the Ivory Coast

   Greenpeace International recently accused Archer Daniels Midland of 
funding, along with two other agricultural commodities traders, much of 
the razing of the Amazon rainforest for soy production. The group claims 
that that ADM, along with Cargill and Bunge, are responsible for 60 
percent of the financing of soy production in the vital rainforest 
ecosystem. ADM lends money to farmers who plant in areas of the 
rainforest that have been illegally cleared, alleges Greenpeace, and 
then finances the shipping of soy out of the region. ADM has set up four 
grain silos in the Amazon, for the export of soy from Brazil. The 
primarily destination of the soy is Europe where it ends up as high 
protein cattle feed.

   ADM is also currently being sued by the International Labor Rights 
Fund for alleged involvement in the trafficking, torture and forced 
labor of children who cultivate and harvest cocoa beans in the Ivory 
Coast. The suit, which is being filed on behalf of Malian children 
brought against their will to the Ivory Coast, argues that the company, 
as well as Nestle and Cargill, has knowingly turned a blind eye to the 
use of forced child labor in the cocoa plantations where the 
agricultural processor's chocolate originates.

   "It is unconscionable that Nestle, ADM and Cargill have ignored 
repeated and well-documented warnings over the past several years that 
the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave labor," 
says International Labor Rights Fund attorney Natacha Thys. "They could 
have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had 
to go to court as a last resort."

------------------------------------------------------------------------
   For More Information:

   Greenpeace's report "Eating Up the Amazon" 
<http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/7555.pdf>

   Human Rights Watchdog Sues Nestle, ADM, Cargill For Using Forced 
Child Labor 
<http://www.laborrights.org/projects/childlab/FinalCocoa-Complaint_Jul05.pdf> 


------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Sasha Lilley is a writer for CorpWatch and producer of the program 
Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Go to Original <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13123960/>

   Alternative Fuel Ethanol Gains in Popularity
   The Associated Press

   Sunday 04 June 2006

   White House, Wall Street help push corn product's explosive growth.

   Coon Rapids, Iowa - A tractor trailer rig rumbles into the Tall Corn 
Ethanol plant. Corn pours from openings in its belly to bins 
underground, where conveyor belts and buckets haul it to gleaming steel 
silos rising 13 stories above the Iowa plains.

   The 40-acre distillery turns corn into alcohol in quantities that 
would make a moonshiner drool. Instead of white lightnin', the brew is 
converted to ethanol, a fuel that makes money for farmers and is seen as 
a possible solution to today's high oil and gas prices.

   Like the other modern-day stills dotting the Midwestern landscape, 
the Coon Rapids plant reached capacity soon after opening - within 12 
days, to be precise.

   Ethanol production in the United States is growing so quickly that 
for the first time, farmers expect to sell as much corn this year to 
ethanol plants as they do overseas.

   "It's the most stunning development in agricultural markets today - 
I can't think of anything else quite like this," says Keith Collins, the 
US Agriculture Department's chief economist.

   The amount of corn used for ethanol, estimated at 2.15 billion 
bushels this year, would amount to about 20 percent of the nation's 
entire crop, according to department projections.

   Even as ethanol devours corn and pushes prices higher, the president 
and Congress are calling for even greater ethanol use. Wall Street 
cannot seem to get enough of ethanol-related investments. Automakers are 
speeding ethanol-capable vehicles onto the road.

   Yet the ethanol industry is not without its critics, who question 
whether tax incentives provided by Congress are really needed.

   "Train Cars After Train Cars"

   The enthusiasm for ethanol makes farmer Lynn Phillips want to grow 
more corn. Phillips helped raise the money for the farmer-owned Tall 
Corn plant, which opened in 2002 as a way to make more money by 
processing every kernel of locally grown corn.

   "We saw train cars after train cars of raw material being shipped 
away and value being added somewhere else," said Phillips. Now, the corn 
"is still going out on train cars - it's just going out in the form of 
ethanol and distillers' grain."

   Corn can cost more to grow because it needs heavy applications of 
fertilizer. Right now, Phillips plants corn on about half his 2,000 
acres and soybeans on the rest.

   Inside the ethanol plant, corn is ground and mixed with water to 
make mash. It is heated and mixed with enzymes to convert starch into 
sugar and fermented with yeast to make alcohol - just like making 
moonshine. Hanging in the air around the 500,000-gallon fermenting tanks 
is the smell of sweet, white wine.

   The mixture is kept just below 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeast seem 
happier below that temperature, general manager Owen Shunkwiler hollers 
over the hum. Shunkwiler works for South Dakota-based Broin Companies, 
which invested in Tall Corn and is responsible for its operations.

   After fermentation, the mixture is boiled to remove water, then 
dehydrated to boost the alcohol content. Before leaving the plant, a 
denaturant, or poison, is added to make the alcohol unfit for drinking. 
Then the ethanol is ready for shipping to fuel storage terminals that 
will blend it with gasoline as it goes into trucks for distribution to 
gas stations.

   Also yielded in the process is livestock feed. Corn kernels minus 
the starch are left over - think South Beach for cows. Every 56-pound 
bushel makes about 17.4 pounds of grain feed, according to the 
Agriculture Department.

   Tall Corn produces 150,000 gallons of ethanol each day, enough to 
power an estimated 272 cars for an entire year if they ran on ethanol 
alone.

   But automobiles do not run on pure ethanol. Instead, ethanol is 
combined with unleaded gasoline to boost its octane rating and reduce 
emissions.

   The most common blends are 10 percent ethanol, approved for any make 
or model sold in the US, or 85 percent ethanol, known as E-85 and used 
in specially made flexible fuel vehicles. About 5 million vehicles in 
the US can run on E-85; more are in production.

   In Iowa in April, regular unleaded gasoline was selling for $2.71, 
E-10 for $2.65 and E-85 for $2.33.

   Visions of Growth

   With demand comes expansion. In Iowa alone, three new ethanol plants 
opened last month. The industry likely will outpace a mandate from 
Congress to pump out 7.5 billion gallons a year by 2012, according to 
Collins.

   Meanwhile, lawmakers envision vastly more ethanol in the nation's 
automobiles. Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., are 
pushing to require 60 billion gallons of ethanol and soy-based biodiesel 
by 2030.

   An expansion that big would require sources for ethanol besides 
corn. Ethanol is made from sugar cane in Brazil, which meets about half 
its fuel demand with ethanol. Sorghum, another feed grain, accounts for 
about 3 percent of US ethanol, according to the Agriculture Department.

   Research is under way on other potential sources, such wood fibers 
and residue from crop harvesting.

   The big question is whether oil and gas will remain expensive.

   "When the price of anything gets high enough, then all kinds of 
substitutes come out of the closet," Collins said. "That's what's going 
on now. As long as the price of oil stays high, where ethanol is 
profitable, this industry is going to keep growing."perm