Re: The More Things Change
Iain Murray
The Corner
The current bioethanol demand is just scratching the surface. As Dennis Avery points out in his study, Biofuels, Food or Wildlife? The Massive Land Costs of US Ethanol, current legislation pushed by the White House will demand a vast amount of US land:
<<< America’s total corn crop in 2005 was about 280 million metric tons, second only to the record 2004 crop of 300 million tons. In both those years, the U.S. produced about half of the world’s corn crop, and an even higher percentage of its corn exports. However, a recent University of Minnesota study says that if all the current output of U.S. corn and soybeans were put into biofuels, it would replace only 12 percent of our gasoline demand and 6 percent of our diesel needs.
Replacing 10 percent of U.S. gasoline with corn ethanol would require planting more than 55 million more acres of corn, on top of the 80 million acres of corn U.S. farmers are already planting. Where would we plant the additional corn? The only underused cropland in the U.S. is roughly 30 million acres of land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve—which is mostly too arid to grow corn.
Efforts to force-feed the U.S. corn ethanol industry are likely to trigger lots of forest clearing, but U.S forestland is of substantially poorer quality than its corn land. Our corn is grown on our best land, while our forests grow on our worst. Forest land is steeper, dryer, poorly drained, or somehow lacking—and therefore low-yielding. If the land quality of the cleared forests is only half as high as the quality of the current corn land, the additional land required to displace 10 percent of our gasoline with corn ethanol could total 110 million acres. >>>
An environmental disaster by anyone's measure. Meanwhile, because of the world demand for biofuels, the World Food Program is warning it will have to cut back food distribution or demand more money. Good one, guys.
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