Nonrenewable renewables: The hidden life of biofuels

The farm fields are again sprouting with their recently planted corn and soybeans, and those verdant fields, once reserved for growing food, are increasingly devoted to what people are now calling renewable fuels. Those fuels, ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybean oil, are touted as the path to energy independence and clean air and as an answer to global warming. How innocuous and wholesome these fuels must seem: They come from things we eat; the smell of biodiesel is no more offensive than that of french fry oil; ethanol is nothing more than the same alcohol we find in all alcoholic drinks; and the carbon dioxide which both fuels release into the atmosphere gets reabsorbed by the following year’s planting.

That, anyway, is the extent of the story one might get from recent coverage of the biofuels boom. But are these fuels really the renewable wonders they seem? That may hinge on what people mean by renewable. If they mean that for a limited time the crops from which liquid biofuels are made can be repeatedly grown, harvested and processed to make biofuels, then they are perhaps in a very narrow sense correct. If what they mean by renewable is sustainable, then they are just plain wrong. Biofuels produced the way we are producing them today are not even close to sustainable. In truth, the current production methods for biofuels are more like mining operations than farming operations.
That calls into question whether such fuels can deliver the benefits which are now being so incessantly trumpeted in the news media.