080420 Biofuel eats The Poor

Doing what is right is not always easy. I am not talking about any moral debates over the good of the many outweighing the good of the one no matter whether the argument is attributed to John Stewart Mill or to Mister Spock. Sometimes it is just hard to know what is right.

One quick example of this is the compact fluorescent light bulb. We all know that we are supposed to use them because they are good for the environment. There is a commercial that plays quite often. I do not know what there are advertising but there is a happy smiling woman who tells us that doing something simple like changing a light bulb gives us a feeling of empowerment over our lives. I changed my own light bulbs over to the fluorescent kind two years ago. The problem is – when these bulbs die and we throw them away, they are full of toxic mercury. Suddenly they are very bad for the environment.

A bigger and more pressing issue is ethanol. It is a popularly accepted belief that ethanol is good for the environment. I believe that it is true that corn burns cleaner than oil. However, corn burns a lot less efficiently than oil. You use more ethanol fuel to go somewhere than you do oil. It also takes more energy to turn corn into fuel than it does to turn oil into fuel. Ethanol is also corrosive. Fuel made from oil can be pumped through a pipeline. Ethanol would eat through the pipeline so it needs to be trucked to where it’s going. To burn a gallon of ethanol turns out more pollution than a gallon of oil based fuel.

This is not to say that there is no place for ethanol within the whole. Even with all of the new oil being pumped out of the ground, it is not going to be here forever. I remember the predictions that it would be gone by 1990. While that was wrong, it is true that is a finite resource that everyone wants and this takes power and control away from us (the users) and gives it to people who have radically different feelings about life and death (the producers). We need to find better ways to make ethanol and better ways to use it.

The biggest problem with ethanol is that it reduces the food supply. I have to give credit to Fidel Castro, he had this right. Because the industrialized world is concerned with how much we need to spend to fill our gas tanks, food is being removed from the third world. A sizable chunk of the world population spends seventy-five percent or more of their assets on food. Any increase in food prices is devastating to them. We are beginning to see food riots in places like Egypt and the Philippines. The famines in Africa look to be the worst they have been in generations.

Back here in the states, we are seeing price increases that dwarf what happens at the pump. Whether we are shopping in the cereal aisle or ordering a thick crust pizza, the price is going up because the food supply is being tampered with. Anything with corn or wheat or flour in it is affected. Over the last few decades, we have seen the phenomenon of low cost food being less healthy than more expensive food and low cost food is loaded with corn syrup and corn starch.

Ethanol is a quick fix that we can do so that we feel better about ourselves, but the reality is that it causes pollution and drives millions to starvation. We were better served to find ways to replace petroleum wherever possible.