Ethanol Under Fire
As expected, the big push for ethanol production is being challenged at the highest levels. It was only a matter of time before this happened. They didn’t lash out against it initially when it was “just” forests being cut down and habitat devastated to make room for more fields, but now it started directly affecting humans and they noticed.
I never agreed with producing ethanol from corn or any other plant that requires cultivating or is also used for food. For some reason I’ll never understand the world’s human population is allowed to keep increasing, the standard of living is understandably also increasing, for another strange reason a better efficiency is not exactly a top priority when increasing said standard of living, so obviously those resources that are being redirected towards ethanol production are badly missed by those who just want food. What concerns me more is that some of the land used for those cultures should be habitat for other animals and part of it certainly used to be forested, but at least now even those who only care about humans have a good reason to worry.
Let’s look at the issue for a moment. You grow crops to replace oil, therefore further increasing humanity’s ecological footprint while at the same time reducing the quantity of those crops available as food. You do that in order to produce something that is still a fuel to be burned and therefore still generates greenhouse and toxic gases, not to mention that the production process generates plenty of those as well, plus other harmful substances.
According to an article from National Geographic Magazine, in a best case scenario, corn ethanol requires 23% less energy to produce and emits 22% less greenhouse gases when burning compared to regular fuel but, depending on the manufacturing process, it’s actually possible for it to require slightly more energy to produce than regular fuel. When you also consider the fact that it contains 33% less energy than regular fuel, the deal is starting to look dubious at best. However, according to the same article, cellulose from weeds, plant waste or used paper can be used to produce ethanol. The result, while still containing 33% less energy than regular fuel, would require between 50% and 97% less energy to produce, depending on the technology used, and emit 91% less greenhouse gases! Not to mention the possibility of producing biodiesel from algae, which is considered to be even better but is even further away from being fully developed.
Comparing the two options, the winner is quite obvious. You use waste and considerable less other resources to produce a fuel that burns much cleaner than the one which requires cultivated crops to be produced. If you support biofuels at all, there should be no question over which one should be funded and promoted. But, of course, people want results yesterday and corn ethanol is already here while cellulosic ethanol is still under development… Will we ever learn?
But I don’t think an increased output of biofuels is the solution at all, since either way they will still produce greenhouse gases and other harmful substances. I’m all for electric vehicles and clean means of producing electricity, finally ending the cycle of constantly spitting out toxins into the environment. Still, what matters even more than that is how many vehicles are there, how often are they used and, in the end, how many people are on this planet. The first thing each of us should do, and especially those of us who aren’t exactly poor, is use less of everything. And then work on reducing the population, preferably before we’d have to resort to mass murders for it and certainly before the planet will take care of the problem for us.
