Wesley Clark: Ethanol's field general

Triumphant just a few years ago, the ethanol industry now finds itself embattled. Enter Wesley Clark to rally the troops.

(Fortune Magazine) — If ever there were an industry in need of a general, it’s the ethanol industry. Already under siege from food companies blaming biofuels for rising grocery prices, ethanol companies are now seeing their profit margins crushed by falling prices for their product. Compounding the problem, many environmentalists — who five minutes ago seemed to be in ethanol’s corner — have turned against the corn-based fuel.

Reporting for duty in ethanol’s counterattack: Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former NATO commander, who signed on in February as co-chairman of an upstart ethanol trade group called Growth Energy. Clark, 64, has fully embraced the private sector since ending his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. In addition to co-chairing Growth Energy, Clark is on the board of Dutch wind-turbine maker Juhl Wind and serves as chairman of the New York investment bank Rodman & Renshaw (RODM). At Growth Energy, Clark has lobbied against efforts in California to hold ethanol accountable for deforestation in Brazil, he’s pushed back against claims that diverting corn to ethanol drives up food prices, and he’s spoken out in favor of a Growth Energy proposal to increase the maximum allowable ethanol blend in conventional gasoline to 15% from 10%.

Without support for corn ethanol now, Clark says, the industry won’t be able to fund advances in second-generation cellulosic ethanol made from nonfood inputs such as switchgrass. He also contends that the extra 7 billion gallons a year that would be produced with a move to so-called E15 gasoline equates to $10.5 billion that American consumers would no longer be spending on foreign oil. “Some people would rather pay that money out to other countries, because they take a slice of it,” Clark says, jabbing at the oil industry. “But I would ask you, What is better for the country?”

The thing is, there are two wars being fought here. There’s the public war against ethanol’s critics, but there’s also a civil war within the ethanol industry itself. And Clark’s hiring is the clearest sign yet of how the owners and operators of many of the ethanol plants built since 2005 are pushing back against the industry’s old-line leadership.

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