Is it too late to stop the ethanol con job?

Not so long ago, you could feel complacent – smug even – about your little greenish exertions. You traded your SUV for a smaller set of wheels. You bought compact florescent bulbs and dragged the old push mower out of storage. You approved of ethanol and other biofuels and vowed to buy them whenever possible. Okay, there wasn’t a lot of sacrifice involved. But you could feel a tad superior to your fossil-fuel-slurping neighbours.
You might feel a little less smug today. You might even feel guilty. Why? Because biofuels aren’t living up to their hype. By now, it’s obvious they won’t cure the planet of its oil addiction or take the edge off global warming – two of the alleged advantages touted by the biofuel industry. Biofuels may even be harming the planet. The oil industry was never keen on biofuels, but you never believed the oil industry. Now no less a sober authority than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development says biofuels – notably ethanol, a fuel worshipped by governments, farmers and refiners in Canada, the United States and parts of Europe – might be a con job on a massive scale.

An OECD report released this week said biofuels may “offer a cure that is worse than the disease they seek to heal.” It said the vast amounts of land devoted to biofuel production harms biodiversity and pollutes the environment with herbicides and pesticides. (A July report put out by the OECD and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said rising biofuel demand is “underpinning higher agriculture prices” and will lead to a “food-versus-fuel” debate).

The OECD recommended that governments “cease to create new mandates for biofuels and investigate ways to phase them out.” It recommended oil conservation instead of “subsidizing inefficient new sources of [biofuels] supply.”

None of the OECD’s musings, of course, is new. A small army of scientists and environmentalists has warned for years that ethanol, especially of the corn-based variety so popular in North America, is, at best, misleading advertising, at worst, a crime against nature and taxpayers alike.

The warnings were simply buried by the endless propaganda peddled by the ethanol movement and its slick lobbyists and PR men. To be against ethanol was to be against farmers, un-green and unpatriotic. Less ethanol meant more foreign oil, and no one wanted that.

The Globe and Mail (Canada)