Children of the Corn: Brutal Honesty

Back in reality, almost all fertilizers and pesticides are oil-based, and large-scale agriculture requires huge numbers of tractors and trucks. Converting corn and sugar to ethanol is wildly energy-intensive. Professor Emeritus David Pimental Ph.D. ’51, entomology, has shown that “more fossil energy is still required to produce a liter of ethanol than the energy output in ethanol.” He and others have found that using ethanol requires about 70 percent more energy, usually fossil fuels, than it produces. Producing ethanol results in a net loss of energy, but this isn’t even its worst feature. At the core of any debate on ethanol is a question — what will an oil addict sacrifice to feed his addiction? Because ethanol and most of its biofuel cousins require turning food into fuel, Bush and Obama are trying to make burning food a policy to meet our energy demands.
Leave it to the men who can’t decide when to end the Occupation of Iraq to tell us global warming can be stopped by incinerating food. Large-scale production of ethanol and biofuels requires huge amounts of farmland around the globe to be turned into fuel fields, usually at the expense of small, poor farmers. Monoculture plantations are mechanized, and ethanol farms will sell almost all of their crops to gas-guzzlers. Consequentially, there is less food to eat, and the remaining food is more expensive. And, for Brazilian farmers, food insecurity increases, while jobs vanish. This isn’t a big problem for obese Americans, but it can devastate and starve subsistence farmers around the world. This is not good policy; this is what happens when oil-addicts sacrifice calories for internal combustion engines.

Corn farmers in the Midwest, particularly in Obama’s Illinois, are lobbying the Senator and many others to subsidize them with your money. “Now is the opportunity to get this done — not only for the future of our farmers, the future of our economy and the future of our environment, but to make our country a place that is independent and innovative enough to control its own energy future,” Obama said in a press release. At the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition meeting, he again linked ethanol to national security: “But all we really need to know about the danger of our oil addiction comes directly from the mouths of our enemies.” Paying farmers to turn their crops into biofuels, he thinks, takes a target away from bin Laden, and helps clean the air to reduce climate change.

But biofuels, like carbon trading and offsetting, have huge costs and don’t reduce emissions. And their benefits are distant, if they ever materialize, while their penalties are huge and immediate.

Over 1 in 6 people on our planet is malnourished, and millions die every year from malnutrition-related diseases and food insecurity. Burning corn to drive our cars, instead of using it to feed people isn’t a very responsible strategy. By turning to biofuels, we’ve ranked our fat industries over the nutritional needs of many more skinny people. Senator Obama’s much-repeated affection for “hope” is hollow — the man prioritizes his air conditioning over food! Whether or not that’s his purpose, this is the effect.

Cornell Daily Sun