Ethanol: A Costly Snake Oil and a Danger to America
Ray Wallace
Ray Wallace
April 22, 2006
President Bush thought it was OK for Arabs to buy control of U.S. ports. Does he also think it's OK for Arabs to invest nearly $185 billion in the fire- and explosion-prone fuel factories now being planned, built, and operated -- with U.S. taxpayer money -- in farm communities across America?
Concerning Thomas C. Dorr of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the following appears in "Dorr calls for new rural investment opportunities," by Jean Caspers-Simmet, in the Feb. 14, 2006 Rochester, Minnesota Agri News at
webstar.postbulletin.com
"Last June Dorr attended the Second Annual Renewable Energy Finance Forum in New York City.
"Represented in the room was $125 billion of capital willing to invest in green energy. A venture capitalist shared how his firm raised $185 billion capital to invest in Midwest ethanol refining capacity. Dorr asked how much came from the Middle East. The investor said nearly all of it."
Addressing the National Ethanol Conference Panel in Las Vegas, Nevada on Feb. 22, 2006, Mr. Dorr seems to have been responding to the above news report when saying (as documented on the USDA's own website at
rurdev.usda.gov
"From a national energy policy standpoint, it doesn't make a great deal of difference who owns the plants."
Doesn't it?
If Middle East billions get invested in ethanol plants in the U.S. Midwest alone, doesn't that put our farmers -- whom the Bush Administration keeps urging to invest in ethanol plants -- in direct and unfair competition with oil-rich sheiks?
This also puts the lie to government propaganda that taxpayer-subsidized ethanol distilleries are supposed to benefit U.S. family farmers and their local communities.
Bush also claims ethanol helps cure U.S. addiction to Middle East oil.
Whoever heard of his Middle East buddies' investing a penny to wean anyone off oil?
Alarms should be going off everywhere. Instead, Bush neglects to truthfully tell America:
Making ethanol costs more and uses more foreign oil than it replaces.
Vehicles burning ethanol run fewer miles.
Ethanol wouldn't be made if taxpayer subsidies stopped.
Says Cornell University's David Pimentel:
"The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an economical fuel. Further, its production and use contribute to air, water and soil pollution and global warming....
"Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, economy or the environment. Ethanol production requires large fossil energy input, and therefore, it is contributing to oil and natural gas imports and U.S. deficits."
? From "Cornell ecologist's study finds that producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy," by Susan S. Lang, on the Cornell University website at:
news.cornell.edu
Tad W. Patzek of the University of California at Berkeley adds:
"The National Corn Growers Association has been asking every corn grower to lobby Congress to increase domestic production of fossil fuels by opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and the Outer Continental Shelf for exploration and production, and by drilling everywhere on U.S. territory for oil and gas. Why? Because the U.S. agricultural industry depends heavily on natural gas, coal, and petroleum for its existence....
"Corn agriculture is a scheme to launder fossil fuels into an Industrial raw material, while damaging the environment of roughly half the continental U.S. land mass, and poisoning most rivers, streams, and coastal waters."
? From "Corn Ethanol: Laundering Fossil Fuels, Bilking Taxpayers, Damaging the Environment," by Tad W. Patzek, the April 2006 featured story in the Energy Tribune, at: energytribune.com
Patzek reduces matters to the following dollar terms on this Berkeley site:
petroleum.berkeley.edu
"American taxpayers have spent a staggering $143.8 billion on farm subsidies over the past ten years, more than $104 billion of which (72%) went to 10% of recipients....
"As long as agribusiness receives tens of billions of dollars each year in crop-price and environmental subsidies, it obtains a significant gift from the taxpayers: industrial raw materials (e.g., corn grain) at rock-bottom prices, which can be processed into, say, ethanol at a significant profit.
"This profit is further enhanced by a subsidy of 50 cents per gallon of ethanol -- also courtesy of the taxpayers."
SO WHY are taxpayers subsidizing the corn-to-ethanol factories now dotting America, with more planned? Why shovel taxpayer money to corporations first to make and then to use ethanol? Why is government forgiving these corporations their taxes -- while requiring ordinary taxpayers not only to make up the loss but also to pay big prices for the very ethanol they've repeatedly subsidized?
The excuse being given is that ethanol is "green energy." But the only green that concerns foreign investors is in U.S. wallets. It wasn't to improve American environment that an Australian corporation with Asian ties recently bought 60 per cent controlling interest in Midwest Grain Processors, the biggest so-called "farmer owned" ethanol producer in the entire U.S.
The national press isn?t reporting:
How much ethanol pollutes as it's being burned in vehicles and as it's being made in smoke-stacked, air-, water-, people-, and community-fouling U.S. factories.
Where all the water is coming from -- in drought-concerned America -- for new factories that guzzle up to six gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol produced.
The week after declaring a state-wide Drought Watch and telling residents to cut back on water use, PA Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty announced plans for water-hungry fuel factories. "Massive" is how she proudly described a PA fuel factory as likely the largest east of the Mississippi. Did McGinty forget her public warning (just the week before) that PA's Susquehanna River is 65 per cent below its normal flow?
In addition to addicting folks to more Middle East crude, the powerful U.S. agribusiness lobby --in tandem with the powerful international ethanol lobby -- is now subjecting U.S. officials, farmers, air, water, food supply, and economy to the whims of global energy cartels. Ethanol is another name for world-class snake oil.
U.S. tax dollars shouldn't disappear into areas of the world that sanction religious beheadings and terrorism. No money should disappear anywhere because of lies about protecting the environment.
Something good:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ruled that, starting in May 2006, not a drop of polluting ethanol need ever again be blended with gasoline.
Today's gasoline refineries already have the technology to make cleaner-burning fuel without using anything grown on a farm.
Something else:
The EPA now wants to permit individual ethanol factories to dump hundreds of tons more pollution into the air -- over twice as much as currently allowed!
Not "green," that's nuts.
Why is the EPA backing a costly, toxic, Middle East-supporting fuel that does the exact opposite of what we're told it does? Why is the EPA selling out our environment, agriculture, and economic integrity?
International ethanol giant Archer Daniels Midland, reportedly the largest recipient of U.S. corporate welfare, wants taxpayers to keep on subsidizing the building of multimillion-dollar ethanol factories ? and to then keep on paying investors 50 cents for each gallon of ethanol flowing, night and day, from these factories. State and local officials keep handing ethanol investors more money.
This is no benefit to taxpayers. It's a gravy train for outsiders. The proof is that Middle East and other foreigner investors are jumping on it. Ethanol shills talk pretty about renewable solar and wind energy but they don't use sunlight or any kind of wind but their own hot air.
They tell farmers that ethanol raises corn prices. But the less that market-controlling ethanol barons decide to pay for corn, the bigger are their own ? and the less are farmers' -- profits. Furthermore, corn is only a temporary ingredient of ethanol, as President Bush himself indicated in his last State of the Union speech.
With oil supplies declining, why pay oil men for fuel made from corn or anything else for which they don't drill? Besides food, this includes so-called "renewables" like U.S. garbage, U.S. manure, and U.S. rubber tires. Picture the U.S. pollution pouring from such plants!
While trying to hide behind U.S. farmers, foreign ethanol investors hope U.S. taxpayers sleep through this disaster. The global ethanol industry relies on subsidies. It doesn't need one farmer anywhere as a permanent partner. U.S. Farmers are ethanol patsies. So are U.S. taxpayers who get handed the bill.
The same, corporation-lobbied politicians who've led us into war in the oil-rich Middle East are leading the ethanol parade at home. Ethanol is simply the most widespread, costly, and U.S. security-risking money scam in history.
NO GOVERMENT should make anyone pay a penny to any industry -- let alone to investors from countries seeking our downfall -- for an oil-wasting agricultural product that compromises a single U.S. farmer or is made in a single, toxic U.S. factory.
In each American community that hosts or is being targeted by an ethanol factory, common sense, honesty, and citizens' physical and economic health are being needlessly trashed for others' profits.
So are America's agricultural foundation, political future, and energy security.
There's plain terrorism, and there's economic terrorism.
And there's plain stupidity.
|
