From the department of “told you so” comes this about-face on what was supposed to be an environmental solution. It seems the cure is worse than the disease:
“CORYDON, Iowa — The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America’s push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.”
“Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.”
Dina Cappiello and Matt Apuzzo report for the Associated Press November 12, 2013.
h/t to reader Michael J. Bentley
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Here’s the surprising headline and money quote:
The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.
Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.
The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.
“They’re raping the land,” said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.
UPDATE: here is the video report from AP (h/t _Jim)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX2f4JnfS74
In related news:
EPA orders cut in ethanol in gasoline next year, citing risk of engine damage
November 15
By Sean Cockerham
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Friday proposed the first-ever reduction in the amount of ethanol in the gasoline supply, signaling retreat from the Renewable Fuel Standard passed by Congress in 2007.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants 15.21 billion gallons of renewable fuels blended into gasoline and diesel next year, down from 16.55 billion gallons this year. Most of it is corn-based ethanol.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/15/4624584/epa-orders-cut-in-ethanol-in-gasoline.html#storylink=cpy
Related articles
- Making corn-based ethanol badly hurting environment: AP (cbsnews.com)
- Ethanol criticized as ‘ecological disaster’ (utsandiego.com)
- Obama’s Green Power … Raping The Land (cryandhowl.com)
- EPA orders cut in ethanol in gasoline next year, citing risk of engine damage (kansascity.com)
Oh, and there was massive slash and burn releasing a lot of co2 too. Lots of smoke pollution as well. Pitty the poor orangutans.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/politics-palm-oil
Bangkok Post Obituary:
17 Nov: Bangkok Post Editorial: Climate picture out of Warsaw looking bleak
It’s hard to imagine a worse scenario for action on climate change than what is shaping up in Warsaw, Poland, at the Conference of the Parties (COP19), which runs until Friday. The negotiations have been labelled the “Coal COP” …
Japan announced in Warsaw on Friday that it is rescinding its pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 25% of 1990 levels by 2020, citing the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis as the reason…
Even more damaging to efforts to mitigate the effects of global warning is China’s decision to embark on the construction of at least nine large-scale coal-fuelled synthetic natural gas (SNG) plants in northwestern China and Inner Mongolia. According to the journal Nature Climate Change, these plants would emit seven times the greenhouse gases of conventional natural gas plants…
Meanwhile Canada and the US are betting on bitumen from the tar sands of Alberta, a thick, heavy oil that is among the most greenhouse gas-intensive forms of petroleum to produce. Estimates are that tar sands oil contributes from 15% to 100% more greenhouse gases per barrel than conventional oils because of the resources needed to process it. Aren’t we supposed to be going the other way? …
However, the chances for pro-active measures and a unified policy to head off global warming coming out of Warsaw or any other climate change venue don’t look promising when the two biggest producers of…
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/380223/climate-picture-out-of-warsaw-looking-bleak
“or any other climate change venue “? reality bites.
papertiger says:
November 16, 2013 at 2:54 pm
“If you have a plume of algae growing in the gulf because of fertilyzer runoff, then it’s not a dead zone”
Yeah, I was always amazed by the Media’s and the Green NGO’s definition of “dead” as well.
I thought it was the corn lobby that led to every American food product being 25% corn syrup.
Jimbo says:
November 16, 2013 at 3:06 pm
“Also see Indonesia and the rush for palm oil and biofuel. The result was a massive loss of wildlife habitat, a massive release of ozone from the oil palms, a loss of biodiversity due to monoculture etc. Sometimes I wonder whether Greens aren’t in fact fossil fuel funded agents.”
Indonesia is the other Green; Islam. And they will turn it into a desert. And our Greens will blame us for it.
One of the most horrible political moves of all time. Both Left and Right have allowed it to
continue for far too long. Sheer greed and political fortune.
“Anybody that knows anything about agriculture and growing corn knows that article was a very biased one-sided hit piece about ethanol. ”
Exactly, that is what journalist do. I work in the nuclear end of the energy industry so I am used to AP hit pieces. The productivity of journalists is now a function cut and paste rather than studying the facts.
If your job involves producing something, you job involves protecting the environment. Before the 2005 Energy Bill, American farmers were saying that they could replace MTBE with corn ethanol. And they did. No environmental disasters are apparent.
Schadenfreude: ……defined.
: a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people
============
I think there must be a better word ??
having used the $100bn/year pledge to get “poor nations” onside, this should wake those nations up to the reality. time for those nations to call out CAGW for the scam it always was:
17 Nov: NYT: Steven Lee Myers/Nicholas Kulish: Growing Clamor About Inequities of Climate Crisis
(Steven Lee Myers reported from Warsaw, and Nicholas Kulish from Nairobi, Kenya. Justin Gillis contributed reporting from New York, David Jolly from Paris, and Mohammed Ibrahim from Mogadishu, Somalia)
From the time a scientific consensus emerged that human activity was changing the climate, it has been understood that the nations that contributed least to the problem would be hurt the most. Now, even as the possible consequences of climate change have surged — from the typhoons that have raked the Philippines and India this year to the droughts in Africa, to rising sea levels that threaten to submerge entire island nations — no consensus has emerged over how to rectify what many call “climate injustice.”…
The sheer magnitude and complexity of the issue make such compensation unlikely. The notion of seeking justice for a global catastrophe that affects almost every country — with enormous implications for economic development — is not only immensely complicated but also politically daunting.
It assumes the culpability of the world’s most developed nations, including the United States and those in Europe, and implies a moral responsibility to bear the costs, even as those same nations seek to draft a new treaty over the next two years that would for the first time compel reductions by rapidly emerging nations like China and India. As a group, developing countries will within a decade have accounted for more than half of all historical emissions, making them responsible for a large share of the continuing impact humanity will make, if not the impact already made.
Assigning liability for specific events — like Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with winds of at least 140 miles an hour, making it one of the strongest storms on record — is nearly impossible…
How to compensate those nations hardest hit by climate changes remains divisive, even among advocates for such action. Some have argued that wealthy countries need to create a huge pool of money to help poorer countries recover from seemingly inevitable losses of the tangible and intangible, like destroyed traditions…
***The United States and other rich countries have made their opposition to large-scale compensation clear. Todd D. Stern, the State Department’s envoy on climate issues, bluntly told a gathering at Chatham House in London last month that large-scale resources from the world’s richest nations would not be forthcoming.
“The fiscal reality of the United States and other developed countries is not going to allow it,” he said. “This is not just a matter of the recent financial crisis. It is structural, based on the huge obligations we face from aging populations and other pressing needs for infrastructure, education, health care and the like. We must and will strive to keep increasing our climate finance, but it is important that all of us see the world as it is.”
Appeals to rectify the injustice of climate change, he added, will backfire. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” he said…
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/world/growing-clamor-about-inequities-of-climate-crisis.html?_r=0
Dated November 12, 2013? I could have swore I came across this exact article over a month ago.
I love Zeke.
This one is horrible. I would say to people to go visit an ethanol plant and see if they would want to eat any of the corn that gets delivered there.
I don’t see any problem whatsoever with getting energy from “bottom of the pile”, worthless grain that livestock won’t even eat because of the bugs and dirt and other contaminates that have gotten into it.
Should we just throw this excess into a landfill? I would prefer it be made into whiskey to bring the price down on that. But, there’s people that don’t think it should be made into whiskey either.
The only time I use ethanol myself is during the winter when excess humidity in my fuel tank condenses and freezes up in the lines. (I Hate that) But, I do like whiskey.
Can we get these ethanol plants to start producing whiskey now?
Land usage and farming practices, I do not believe is the real issue here. What happens to the crops after they are harvested are.
♥
Ethanol and other biofuel mandates have the economic effect of tying the price of food crops (through substitution) to the world price of energy. This is a very bad idea.
@Caleb
>Whatever happened to the switchgrass idea?
Switchgrass pellets are a subject of on-going government experiments in Ontario. There are at least 6 large commercial greenhouses (well, 6 locations, more houses) that are using it for fuel.
There is one large scale farmer in the Goderich area who has 1000 Ha in the crop. I have experimented with 5, 7 and 8mm diameter pellets. It produces about 13 tons per Ha per year which is a heck of a lot more than many if not all other biomass crops that could be grown on Canadian farmland.
The tireless promoter of switchgrass as a viable biofuel is Roger Samson of REAP Canada in Montreal how has devoted more than 20 yeas to the topic. It has a high rate of return, it is easy to grow, process and burn. It does not need any subsidy. Key to using it is to allow the Cl and P to wash off over winter – a discovery that came about through the input of the farmer (no big surprise). There is a lot of crappy land in north America that could be stabilized using this native, hardy plant.
Ethanol in gas: Unintended consequences.
MTBE in gas: Unintended consequences.
http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/unregulated/mtbe.cfm
Why not just leave the gas alone?
http://m.iowafarmertoday.com/news/crop/cellulosic-ethanol-comes-of-age-in/article_66e71ebe-4712-11e3-9316-001a4bcf887a.html?mobile_touch=true
For those interested in the state of cellulose based ethanol, see the link above.
As an Iowa native, I’d also like to make a couple points.
First, I am not now and never have been a fan of ethanol. I come from north central/west part of the state. There are IIRC 11 ethanol plants within a 2 hour drive and 3 bio diesel plants. The horrid waste of taxpayer money is all around that industry. A group of farmer investors built a new bio diesel plant in the county seat, Algona. During construction bean prices skyrocketed, meaning bean oil, the feed stock for bio diesel, did as well. They finished the plant, spun it up for 2 days or so, thereby qualifying for a large chunk of Federal money, then shut it down. They made their investment plus profit for a simple run up.
As for the conservation acres, you the taxpayer were paying the farmers not to plant those acres. A running joke within the state for years, dating back to when there was a glut of corn and soybeans and the .gov decided that it wasnt a good idea to subsidize it all, so they offered what at the time were called set aside acres. Corn prices were, at the time, around $1.50/ bushel, farmers were in dire straits, so they signed up in droves…free money with no input cost. So now corn is up, and farmers are like any business person, they want to maximize profit while they can, because if anyone knows every year is a crapshoot it’s a farmer. They view ethanol as a savior of their way of life, right or wrong.
As concerns Corydon, this is some of the worst farmland in the state…..hilly, sandy. Pull out an atlas that shows county lines, look at the two rows of counties from the Missouri border north…those have historically been the poorest counties in the state because of the poor performing farmground. The fact that farmers who have historically struggled to eke out a living decided to try and increase acreage, while not a good decision, is, if you know the area, not surprising. Terracing served them well for decades in that area, but some felt they could slope the ground and increase acreage. Again, bad idea. Name a business that hasn’t had one.
If you want to blast ethanol from a scientific/economic standpoint, blast away. However, buying into the idea that Iowa is some third world craphole because farmers are destroying the land in a manic rush to grow more corn can have never been there. These people actually do live where they work, and not one farmer I know would deliberately endanger his family or his ground. Like a lady said earlier, harming the ground is like shooting yourself in both feet. Some practices may be found to not be as good as others, but innovation in agriculture is feeding the world, even with ethanol eating up some of the supply.
If you want to see Iowa up close and personal, come and ride your bicycle on RAGBRAI, where bicycle enthusisasts spend a week riding from the Missouri to the Mississippi. It draws riders from all 50 states and a number of foreign countries, one of the biggest bike rides in the world. You go through the most rural areas of the state, and it is a great way to see Iowa up close and personal.
The EPA mandate cut will be up for public comment soon. When that proposal shows up on regulations.gov we need to drown out Big Ethanol with thousands of comments about how the mandate should definitely be lowered and even eliminated.
justsomeguy wrote how ethanol from sugarcane can now be imported. Yes but— I believe there is a cost prohibitive tariff of over fifty cents a gallon on it. The whole problem is we don’t have a free market in energy. Government mandates force us to use so much alcohol. Bio-fuels don’t have to be banned, they just have to compete honestly with all other sources of energy. The US would have a very modest ethanol business. We will never learn that the government mandating economic policy is nothing but distorting, inefficient, ineptitude.
Caleb, thanks for asking! The concept of “cellulosic crops to ethanol,” focused upon switchgrass, was based upon the premise that, with enough government incentives, breakthroughs would be made in the processing and production that would achieve economies-of-scale.
Alas, the concept runs into the face of physics, biochemistry and fermentation science. Cellulose is a polymer of glucose units, covalently bound. IF you can break those covalent bonds, in theory, you’ll have scads and scads of free sugars available for fermentation!! Alas, it ain’t that easy, and the required enzymes are very expensive to produce. So, supply-chain and technical problems are killing that concept entirely.
http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2011/09/12/the-problem-with-cellulosic-ethanol/
An ethanol question from a layman.
Where I work we use roughly 5 tons of liquid CO2 a day. Our supplier gets it from ethanol production.
In light of ethanol in gas supposing to reduce CO2 emissions and thus CAGW, does anyone know just how much CO2 is produced by ethanol production?
A rebutal article …
Ethanol advocates, Vilsack dispute report
_Jim says (November 16, 2013 at 12:19 pm): “Did you review the video or the pictures accompanying the article at the AP.org website?”
Yes I did. Did you?
Did you notice the overblown rhetoric? “Conservation” land has been “wiped out”, or “vanished”. What AP actually means is “put (back?) into production”, but apparently the goal is to alarm, not inform. AP’s evidence for widespread soil erosion is a couple of scary sound bites, quick aerial shots of two unidentified fields, and some closeups of small muddy channels, apparently in a corn field. As I recall, at least two of their photos illustrating soil erosion were taken in soybean fields! WUWT?
Conspicuously lacking in the article are references to published soil erosion studies and any attempt to get the other side of the story. Nevertheless, the “other side” has rebutted parts of the AP story (including soil conservation points) here:
http://www.fuelsamerica.org/blog/entry/what-the-ap-got-wrong-on-ethanol
IMHO a news organization with integrity would link to and/or address the rebuttal.
Bottom line, in a world where “news” organizations are known to distort and/or fake the “news”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dateline_NBC#General_Motors_vs._NBC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
(remember “fake but accurate”?) one should view obviously alarmist “news” stories with a healthy skepticism. Now AP’s concern about soil erosion may be justified, but (1) they haven’t made their case, and (2) their story doesn’t square with my personal experience of my family’s farm and its neighbors. So yes, I’m skeptical of the AP’s soil erosion claims.
AP also hasn’t made a detailed case against the economics of the ethanol mandate, but their story does agree with what I’ve learned from other sources, plus there’s the obvious point that the government had to force people to do what they wouldn’t do voluntarily. So I’m much less skeptical of that part of AP’s article. 🙂
My SUV, according to the sticker, gets 450 miles from a tank of pure gas and 320 miles from a tank of ethanol. Fortunately, I can get pure gas for only about 45 cents more per gallon.
King Corn film clip…mentioned the subsidies paid to plant maize..not corn. INedible GMO muck, not fit for man or beast.
then the gmo lads products=increased pest n weed resistance using more chemicals on plants n soil and nasty effects on soil biota.
this isnt using Food for fuel, its not growing safe edible food at all.
remove the subsidies and its going to cost more than it returns.
NO TILL farming….what a joke. hardpans more run off no oxygen to soils more chemicals etc.
I grew up with morons like Holdren and ehrlich screaming no oil gas etc or food water.well 40 years on and we have seen bugger all of their dire predictions come to pass, we have more food and fuel now, than back then.
being mindful and not wasting either isnt a bad thing,.
putting animals back OUT in the fields to eat and poop and getting rid of patented crops etc would do a lot to make soils and animals and us healthier.
Gunga Din says:
November 16, 2013 at 9:03 pm
An ethanol question from a layman.
Where I work we use roughly 5 tons of liquid CO2 a day. Our supplier gets it from ethanol production.
In light of ethanol in gas supposing to reduce CO2 emissions and thus CAGW, does anyone know just how much CO2 is produced by ethanol production?
———————————————————————
One glucose (6 carbons) produces two ethanol molecules (2X2 = 4 carbons) and 2 CO2s are blown off or captured (using yeast, that is).
There are some microbes (e.g. acetogens) that convert all the glucose carbons to ethanol, via acetate.
Thanks, GD! Corn ethanol is produced during the fermentation of corn sugars by yeast, which give off carbon dioxide as a waste product. Modern ethanol biorefineries capture & harvest this CO2, and industrial gas companies such as Linde purify the CO2 as as an industrial chemical….it is commonly used as the carbonation in soft drinks like Coke, Pepsi etc. We also use CO2 as a replacement for mineral acids like sulfuric, it is valuable stuff.
Supposedly, this CO2 doesn’t contribute to GHG accumulation since corn, as a living plant, took up CO2 in order to grow, so it is theoretically “carbon neutral.” However, the production of corn takes substantial fossil fuel inputs (fertilizer production, tractor fuel, propane drying, transport, milling, and fermentation), so it is a net loser on the energy balance as well as carbon budget. Folks are only now starting to catch on.
http://chemistry.about.com/od/lecturenoteslab1/f/What-Is-Fermentation.htm