ALEXANDER'S COLUMN
The Ethanol Boondoggle
But Won't Ethanol Help Stop Global Warming?
By Mark Alexander · July 30, 2014 
"Some are weatherwise, some are otherwise." --Benjamin Franklin (1735)
Here in the mountains of east Tennessee, we distill corn mash to produce a product provincially known as Moonshine -- because it is often produced and transported under cover of darkness. Arguably, it is a more useful and beneficial product than that toxic form of distilled alcohol from corn mandated for fuel blends by the Environmental Protection Agency's so-called "Renewable Fuel" Standard.
Now, the word "corny" is an adjective, akin to trite, banal, hackneyed, tired, stale, cheesy, schmaltzy, mushy and sloppy. Those descriptors would be much too kind if applied to the "science" (read: "political calculus") behind the EPA’s mandate for producing and converting corn into ethanol and mixing it with fuel. However, the EPA may be ratcheting up that mandate to require a higher percentage of ethanol in fuel, citing spurious claims that ethanol is better for the environment than fossil fuels.
Why?
The topical answer is that the liberal elite wing of the New Democratic Party, along with a few Corn Belt Republican subsidizers, argue ethanol produces less CO2 after combustion than fossil fuels.
And they are correct.
Combustion of ethanol does produce less CO2 than fossil fuel combustion, which proponents of ethanol claim is the primary factor responsible for anthropogenic global warm ... er, "climate change."
So, if ethanol additives reduce CO2 in the exhaust of automobiles, what's the problem?
The problem is that the overall environmental and human impact of producing corn for conversion into ethanol is devastating. And on top of that, there is little net CO2 reduction from fuel/ethanol blends when one considers the net CO2 increases from cultivation of corn, its distillation into ethanol and its transportation to refineries for fuel blending.
In 2008, just before Barack Hussein Obama's election, the decidedly left-of-center Time magazine ran a cover story entitled "The Clean Energy Myth," noting, "Politicians and big business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they're doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse -- and you're paying for it."
That notwithstanding, the Obama administration made implementation of ethanol mandates its first objective in appeasement of their "climate change" constituency, regardless of the fact that the evidence for the net CO2 reduction rationale was dubious.
There were and remain significant collateral consequences of the ethanol mandate, most notably the inflated cost of grain (read: food) across the board caused by the diversion of corn for ethanol production and the dire implications this has for starving Third World children.
More than 90% of our nation's corn crop went toward feeding people and livestock in the year 2000, with less than 5% of the crop going toward ethanol. In 2013, however, a whopping 40% went toward ethanol.
To illustrate this grossly inefficient use of our natural resources, the amount of grain required to fill a 25-gallon automotive fuel tank with ethanol is enough grain to feed one person for an entire year.
If you don't think you're paying for this, you haven't been paying attention to your food bill.
In 2009, a Duke University study reaffirmed Time magazine's analysis that growing corn for production into biofuel may produce more CO2 than it saves as an alternative to fossil fuel.
| 
