The rush to embrace “biofuels” in the US is an incredible scam.
The main rush here is to produce ethanol from corn. The idea is, if we grow a bunch of corn, and convert it to ethanol, and mix the ethanol with gas to put in our cars, we will be “on the road” to becoming less dependent on foreign oil.
A farce. A joke. A scam. Brought to you, by who else, the folks in congress who are from, guess where, the farm states. And the others they have managed to “convince” or horse-trade with.
Here is why it’s so ridiculous. The basic reason involves the fallacy in farming for fuel. Now, farming is very useful - we absolutely need farming to produce vegetables and grains which we eat directly, or feed to our animals (which we may eat directly, or eat their products). Farming is necessary for food. But if you look at the costs of farming, you will see that it is indeed very expensive. It is expensive in terms of : land use, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers, sowing, plowing, harvesting, weeding, transportation, water use, human labor, etc. etc. These are all necessary, due to the inherent workings of the plant - yes, plants are indeed very efficient users of solar energy. But the “purpose” of a plant is not to produce sugar (from which we could make ethanol) - the “purpose” of a plant is to survive and reproduce. So much of the energy a plant absorbs is used for: reproduction, defense against being eaten by animals, defense against insects, viruses and other diseases, defense against other plants. So when we raise a ear of corn to turn into sugar and ferment into ethanol, we are also raising all of theses other systems which are not really relevant to our intent as a fuel. And we have to pay for all this - in terms of energy it takes to amass all of the chemicals and transportation to get the corn to grow and transport it to “market”. Estimates vary, but it seems clear that the net energy output from ethanol - that is, the energy it takes to produce the corn that produces the alcohol, minus the energy you get out of that alcohol when you burn it is close to zero. Yes, zero. That is, you are no better off, energy wise, after you take the trouble of raising all that corn and turning it into alcohol then you would be if you did nothing! In fact, I contend, you are worse off , because you are using all these precious resources which could be used to produce food to eat, and instead are using them to produce a very crude fuel which is burned in a car. Prices of all food will rise, as a consequence. In fact, that is already happening.
The positive thing I see about this ethanol-from-corn nonsense is that it will be self-limiting. That is, as the price of food (vegetables, meat, everything, really) rises out of sight, and people realize the ethanol craze does them no good whatsoever except raise the price of all of their food, the backlash will end these rip-off programs of subsidies and government inducements.
We can only hope.
