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Van Jones: Corn ethanol swindles the poor by increasing the price of food
Van Jones, a green economy activist and founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, describes how US corn ethanol subsidies have created a dangerous perversion of the food prices.
The great ethanol swindle:
Ethanol is supposed to saves the environment by offering a renewable source of energy (corn and sugar), but the truth about ethanol’s impact is far more complex.
Corn ethanol is inefficient
Jones explains that due to the fertilizer inputs for growing corn, the energy consuming conversion to ethanol and low output of usable fuel from corn, corn-based ethanol is not an efficient means of producing fuel. Corn-based ethanol’s return is roughly on a one-to-one basis, meaning that you are only getting out the same amount of energy you are putting in. By contrast, sugar-based ethanol produces something like ten times as much energy as it takes to create. The US is not, however, a good zone for growing sugar cane.
Linking food and fuel hurts the poor
By offering American farmers another market for selling corn besides food, ethanol subsidies more tightly link food to the price of oil and other fuels. The result is that rising fuel prices create a direct demand for corn, thus increasing the price of a basic food material. Jones cited Mexico’s food riots last January as a precursor to what we will see in the future. Angered at the rising price of tortillas, tens of thousands of Mexican’s took to the streets in protest. To draw an extreme image from Jones’ thinking: The poor will starve while the rich drive cars fueled by food.
Sugar ethanol also has risks
While sugar ethanol offers a far greater energy output than corn-based ethanol, there are environmental risks: A rise in the price of sugar cane could inspire Brazilian farmers to cut down more rain forest to grow sugar cane.
Technorati Tags: ella baker, ellabakercenter, ethanol, food, food prices, poor, van jones, vanjones
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Thank you for posting this interview. One correction, though. Strictly speaking, a rise in the price of sugar or ethanol would NOT inspire Brazilian sugar-cane growers to cut down more rain forest to grow sugar cane. Cane doesn’t grow well in the Amazon, and hence the expansion of the industry has been mainly into the Cerrado, Brazil’s vast (and biodiverse) savanna. However, reduced plantings of soybeans in the United States (largely as a result of increased plantings of corn) IS helping to fuel the clearing of rain forest for soybeans, which do grow there very well. See this story on Mongabay, for example.
1. Where’s all this “left over” plant matter going to come from?
greyfalcon. net/ perlack
greyfalcon. net/ peaksoil
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2. Cellulosic with enzymes is kinda crappy.
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3. Even SugarCane ethanol has it’s downsides.
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4. Here’s something I put together previously which explains all this in further detail.
greyfalcon. net/ zeiger
But as for food prices, thats not really the problem, although it is in the short run.
What you really have to worry about is if we shift all of our food production into Brazil, Indonesia, and Argentina.
i.e. Tropical Rainforrests
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So the issue isn’t really fuel versus food.
It’s fuel versus rainforrest.
Creating fuel with Corn and claiming it to be an enviromentally friendly form of fuel is a scam as well. The amount of fossil fuel used to run the tractors to plant, fertalize, and harvest the corn- compounded with the amount of fossil fuel used to process the corn into Ethanol. Not to mention the amount of fossil fuel used to transport the fuel to places where the sustainable wannabees can quench their guilt by rationalizing they are being green.
The Ethanol program is a scam to sustain the agricultural industry in the USA which for years has been dying faster than our technology and textile production.