“You’ve heard of Live Aid? Well, this is Drive Aid,” an
ardent young man says, as he approaches London pedestrians. “Greedy people in
developing nations are eating huge amounts of food that could easily be turned
into biofuel to power our cars. African acreage the size of Belgium is being
used for food, and we’re saying it should go to cars here in the UK. Can we
have your support?”
Londoners reacted with disbelief and outrage, the
ActionAid UK video shows, and refused to sign his mock petition. The
amusing stunt drove home a vital point: Biofuel programs are turning food into
fuel, converting cropland into fuel production sites, and disrupting food
supplies for hungry people worldwide. The misguided programs are having serious
environmental consequences, as well.
Why, then, can’t politicians, bureaucrats and
environmentalists display the common sense exhibited by London’s citizenry? Why
did President Obama tell Africans (many of whom
are malnourished) in July 2009 that they should refrain from using “dirty”
fossil fuels and use their “bountiful” biofuel and other renewable energy
resources, instead? When will Congress pull the plug on Renewable Fuel
Standards?
Ethanol and other biofuels might have made some sense
when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and established mandates (or
“standards”) requiring that refiners and consumer purchase large quantities of
ethanol and other biofuels. Back then, despite growing evidence to the
contrary, many people thought we were running out of oil and gas, and believed
manmade global warming threatened the planet. But this is not 2005. Those
rationales are no longer persuasive.
The hydraulic fracturing revolution has
obliterated the Club of Rome “peak oil” notion that we are rapidly exhausting
the world’s petroleum. Climategate and other IPCC scandals demonstrated that the “science”
behind climate cataclysm claims is conjectural, manipulated and even
fraudulent. And actual observations of temperatures, storms, droughts, sea levels and
Arctic ice have
refused to cooperate with computer models and Hansen-Gore-EPA-IPCC
disaster scenarios.
In fact, biofuels and Renewable Fuel Standards cannot be
justified on any grounds.
The United States is using 40 million acres of cropland
(Iowa plus New Jersey) and 45% of its corn crop to produce 14 billion gallons
of ethanol annually. This amount of corn could feed some 570 million people, out of the 1.2
billion who still struggle to survive on $1.25 per day.
This corn-centric agriculture is displacing wheat and
other crops, dramatically increasing grain and food prices, and keeping land
under cultivation that would otherwise be returned to wildlife habitat. It
requires millions of pounds of insecticides, billions of pounds of fertilizer,
vast amounts of petroleum-based energy, and billions of gallons of water – to
produce a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline and
achieves no overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Ethanol mandates have caused US corn prices to rocket
from $1.96 per average bushel in 2005 to as much as $7.50 in autumn 2012 and
$6.68 in June 2013. Corn growers and ethanol makers get rich. However, soaring
corn prices mean beef, pork, poultry, egg and fish producers pay more for
corn-based feed; grocery manufacturers pay more for corn, meat, fish and corn
syrup; families pay more for everything on their dinner table; and starving
Africans go hungry because aid agencies cannot buy as much food.
By 2022, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
(amending the 2005 law) requires 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol and
21 billion gallons of cellulosic and other non-corn-based biofuels. That will
monumentally worsen all these problems.
Equally insane, the Environmental Protection Agency’s
draft rule for 2013 required that refiners purchase 14 million gallons of
cellulosic biofuels. There’s a teensy problem: the fuel doesn’t exist. A mere
4,900 gallons were produced in March, and zero the other months. So companies are forced
to buy fantasy fuel, fined big bucks if they do not, and punished if they get
conned into buying fraudulent “renewable fuel credits”
from “socially responsible” companies like Clean Green Fuel, Absolute Fuels and
Green Diesel.
Ethanol collects water, which can result in engine
stalls. It corrodes plastic, rubber and soft metal parts. Pre-2001 car engines,
parts and systems may not be able to handle E15 fuel blends (15% ethanol, 85% gasoline),
adversely affecting engine, fuel pump and sensor durability. Older cars,
motorcycles and boats fueled with E15 could conk out in dangerously inopportune
places; at the very least they could require costly engine repairs. Lawn mowers
and other gasoline-powered equipment are equally susceptible.
On a global scale, the biofuels frenzy is diverting
millions of acres of farmland from food crops, converting millions of acres of
rainforest and other wildlife habitat into farmland, and employing billions of
gallons of water, to produce corn, jatropha, palm oil and other crops for use
in producing politically correct biodiesel and other biofuels.
To top off this seemingly inexhaustible list of policy
idiocies, all this ethanol and other biofuel could easily be replaced with newly abundant oil and gas supplies. Amazing
new seismic, deepwater, deep drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other
technologies have led to discoveries of huge new reserves of oil and natural
gas – and enabled companies to extract far more petroleum from reservoirs once
thought to have been depleted.
That means we can now get vastly more energy from far
less land; with far fewer impacts on environmental quality, biodiversity and
endangered species; and with none of the nasty effects on food supplies, food
prices and world hunger that biofuel lunacy entails.
We could do that – if radical greens in the Obama
Administration, United Nations and eco pressure groups would end their
ideological opposition to leasing, drilling, fracking, Outer Continental Shelf
and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge development, Canadian oil sands, the
Keystone pipeline and countless other projects. We could do so, if they
would stop behaving like environmentalist Bull Connors, arrogantly blocking the
doors to human and civil rights progress.
This colossal global biofuels industry exists only
because resource depletion and climate Armageddon ideologies do not die easily
– and because politicians lavish government mandates and billions of dollars in
taxpayer and consumer subsidies on firms that have persuasive lobbyists and
reliable track records for channeling millions of those dollars back to the
politicians who keep the racket going.
The ActionAid UK video has lent some good British gallows
humor to a serious issue. As another well-known Brit might say, it is time rein
in a global
SPECTRE that has wreaked too much human and environmental havoc.
To get that long overdue effort underway, Congress needs
to amend the 2005 Energy Policy Act, eliminate the Renewable Fuel Standards and
end the taxpayer subsidies.
A few thousand farmers and ethanol makers will
undoubtedly feel some pain. A few hundred politicians will have less money in
their reelection coffers. However, countless wild creatures will breathe much
easier in their newly safe natural habitats – and millions of families will
enjoy a new birth of freedom, a new wave of economic opportunity, and welcome
relief from hunger and malnutrition,
Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for
the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which is sponsoring the All Pain No Gain petition
against global-warming hype. He also is a senior policy adviser to the Congress
of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.
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