Everyone seems to be dissing corn-based biofuels these days. Fidel Castro, Business Week, and the US Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell. An odd cast of characters, eh?
What’s not to love about biofuels? That will take more than just a single blog post to unravel. For those who’ve been asleep during the recent media explosion of comment, hype, hyperbole, and hysteria, we might start by answering the question: what exactly is a biofuel?
Biofuels currently come in two basic types: bioethanol and biodiesel. Made using different types of plants as feedstocks, with different chemical reactions, these both serve to power things – burn them and they make heat that can be converted to useful energy. Biodiesel gets made out of oils – soy, canola, used McDonald’s fry oil, etc. Bioethanol gets made these days primarily from converting corn sugars to ethanol, or in Brazil (and Guatemala – see my 13 March blog entry), from sugar cane. In the future we might also get ethanol through conversion of the much tougher cellulose that makes up plants – called cellulosic ethanol – from Bush’s beloved switchgrass, wood chips, crop waste...
The bête noire of biofuels these days is bioethanol made from corn (or maize to most of the world). Last week Fidel Castro emerged from his sick bed with a long commentary on the folly of corn-based biofuels. http://www.counterpunch.org/castro03302007.html
But it doesn’t take an aging Cuban revolutionary to come to the conclusion that we should not feed corn to cars. Even the US Deputy Energy Secretary figured it out: if you turn corn into fuel, neither cows nor people will be able to eat it. “Corn is not the future of US ethanol: DOE.”
Look, there are a lot of cars on the planet. We could turn all our corn into ethanol to feed the cars and still not have enough fuel to power all of them. And then we’d have no corn at all to feed cows and people. And then the price of corn would go way up (it has already doubled in price over the past year with the current demand for corn-based ethanol, and at over $4 a bushel is higher than it has been in decades). The cost of raising chickens and pigs and cows is already rising precipitously, and before you know it, the powerful livestock lobby will be stampeding on Washington, not to mention low and middle-income consumers.
It's a no-brainer, or as Paul Hitch, president-elect of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association says: "This ethanol binge is insane."
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