How Ethanol Has Hurt The Environment

Political Realities ^ | 11/14/13 | LD Jackson

[LD Jackson]

I am not a fan of ethanol. Because I work in the automotive industry, I have firsthand experience with the effects it has on engines, both small and large. You can read about those effects at this link. The effects I have written about before are all associated with the engines themselves. What I have not focused on before is the effect ethanol has on the environment. I was surprised to see an investigative report from the Associated Press earlier in the week that did just that. I just haven't had the time to write about it until now.

When I was growing up, corn was something you ate or fed to livestock. It was always one of the staples Dad grew in his garden and it was one of the main ingredients in the grains he fed to his cattle and hogs. Mom always felt cheated if her corn didn't make enough ears. If there was a big meal at the Jackson house, corn was always on the menu.

As I have progressed in my life to the point of being over 50 years in age, things have changed. We have been told by the federal government that corn should also be used as a fuel supplement for gasoline. The powers that be in Washington felt so strongly about it, they created an entire industry for ethanol production. The effects on the environment, we were told, would be beneficial. Ethanol subsidies were put into action to make sure ethanol production was profitable to farmers and producers. Ethanol mandates were put into place to make sure a certain percentage of the product was used to supplement gasoline. And we were sold a song and dance and bill of goods that is nothing but a load of nonsense. The report from the Associated Press has been attacked by the ethanol industry, but that doesn't take away from the truths they have exposed.

Huffington Post - With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Mr. Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."

But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation - more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined - have vanished on Mr. Obama's watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America's demand for it.

"They're raping the land," said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president's push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

In some cases, such as its decision to allow wind farms to kill eagles, the administration accepts environmental costs because they pale in comparison to the havoc it believes global warming could ultimately cause.

Ethanol is different.

The government's predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases. That makes the hidden costs even more significant.

The quote I have included is not the full extent of the report. I would urge you to visit the link and read it in its entirety. You should also read the Huffington Post's report on how the ethanol industry has attacked the Associated Press for their investigation.

Frankly speaking, I have been more than a little harsh on President Obama and his push for green energy. It is on his watch that the ethanol industry has grown with such leaps and bounds, but in all fairness, he isn't the man who started this push. The report points out that it was President George W. Bush who signed the law into force that required gasoline production to include billions of gallons of ethanol in the mix. As much as I liked Bush, I didn't agree with many of his policies and his push for ethanol production ranks close to the top of my disagreements with him.

Ethanol was sold to us as a great product. We were told of its properties and how it would allow gasoline to go further. The reality of ethanol is much different from the stories we were told. I mentioned my firsthand experience in the opening paragraph. Simply put, it takes a greater amount of a higher octane ethanol to produce the same horsepower as a lesser amount of a lower octane gasoline. It just is not as efficient as a good grade of gasoline. And one more thing about ethanol that a lot of people do not realize. I'm not sure of the percentage, but a certain number of automobiles that come into our shop with driveability problems are directly related to the amount of ethanol in the gasoline they are using. Even the engines that are supposedly designed to run on ethanol have trouble handling any fuel that is over 10% ethanol. In other words, it just does not work like we were told it would work.

I would urge you again to read the entire report on how the push for using ethanol has hurt the environment. It is a case of unintended consequences on a massive scale and a prime example of why the federal government should not be involved in so many of the issues they are controlling.

How much longer before we realize that the federal government is not an entity that knows everything. The Obama administration is big on saving the environment through their push for green energy and a green economy. How ironic it is that their push for ethanol production is hurting the environment. I'm not happy about the damage they have done, but the irony of it all is pure sweetness.

[digger48]

later

[spokeshave]

Yeah and Ethanol is hydroscopic...that is, it absorbs water....

so can't be transported in regular oil pipelines

so a whole fleet of tanker trucks and rail cars are needed.

The other problem is that it burns with an invisible flame and requires special fire extinguishing equipment....that most fire depts. don't have.

[muir_redwoods]

There is no excuse for spending nearly a dollar to produce a dollars worth of inferior fuel from food.

[urbanpovertylawcenter]

YES AND I CAN DRINK ALCOHOL BUT NOT MIXED IN GASOLINE!

[ez]

It’s time to stop burning corn in engines and leave it for food. If I was King, tomorrow our energy policy would be to work towards electric cars fueled by small local Thorium based energy plants. Thousands of these neighborhood power plants would need to be built, cutting Mideast oil out of the loop. Each house would also be supplemented by solar and natural gas. But that’s just me.

[rktman]

Sarc on/. What is the deal here? Some kind of deniers or something? Where’s your compassion for gaia? Think of all those folks who could have consumed that corn in one form or another. Wait, I’m off track here. Uh, how do we handle the effluent from the processing of ethanol? Maybe the epa needs to talk to the doe about their wasting H20 or somehow abusing it. Sarc off/.
It’s all NOT so confusing. Control is the bottom line. Period.

[Graybeard58]

I’m fortunate, there’s a station within a couple of miles of me that sells regular gasoline (Non ethanol) it’s 5¢ a gallon higher but would be much cheaper than ethanol, if ethanol weren’t subsidized.

[rktman]

Doing some looking around to see if anybody still sells gasoline without ethanol and found this link. Just in case anyone is interested. Not sure how up to date the info is but worth a look.

http://pure-gas.org/

[wita]

I might be ok if there was a choice. If I could choose ethanol blend. I wouldn’t choose ethanol, but we now have an industry that deserves to live without subsidy. Some of the report is pure emotion, but the cat is out of the bag, and stuffing the cat back in is probably going nowhere.

Oh, and btw having a choice might just prove which industry is worth having or saving. Ethanol or pure gasoline.

[Graybeard58]

If I were king, the rule would be, drill where ever you want to, on land you own or lease.

I keep reading that shale oil will eventually make the U.S. a net exporter of oil. Not to worry, the liberals are working hard on messing it up some way.

[muir_redwoods]

A point I’ve made before is that, to observant muslims, buying, possessing and transporting alcohol is forbidden or haram. A muslim shouldn’t buy gasoline because it contains ethanol. It would be like buying eggs, home fries or pancakes at a diner where they are grilled in bacon fat.

[preacher]

[McGruff]

A couple of interesting facts from that pure gas webiste. My home state CT has no stations that carry pure gas. NY state has quite a few. Alot of them are boat marinas. Very few sell 87 octane which most cars recommend. Alaska: all gasoline is ethanol-free. Interesting facts.

[rktman]

Saw a few prices and it looks like it now costs to NOT add the pop-corn to the gas. There is a place in Reno that sells 97 and 101 octane gas. I haven’t stopped to see if it has pop-corn in it or not. Only saw 2 places that “might” have non-ethanol gas in the whole state. When I was still working at KSC they were using multi/flex-fuel vehicles and more than once the NASA enviro guy chastised us for NOT using the ethanol and using the E-10 blend instead. They had it stored in big composite tanks above ground but we ignored him and went on about our business. We knew the evils of pop-corn gas.

[Carriage Hill]

Depending upon the cost of corn:

http://www.energyfuturecoalition.org/biofuels/fact_ethanol.htm#4

[Ben Ficklin]

LD Jackson writing an article about an article at Huffington Post which was about an AP article.

Actually, AP has published a series of articles on the broader subject. You should read them.

[Daveinyork]

Someone said, and I forget if it was Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman, that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program.

[RipSawyer]

The whole ethanol fiasco is an exercise in absurdity, a thorough study of the facts will convince any open minded investigator that ‘IDIOCRACY’ is indeed a documentary of current conditions.

[RipSawyer]

Five cents? I have it available a mile from my house but it costs a DOLLAR a gallon more than the ethanol mix. At five cents a gallon difference a person would be crazy to buy ten percent ethanol.