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Saturday, February 12, 2011
Powering Up Farmers, Not U.S.
By Frank Bagnato
Albuquerque resident
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Just like in the opinion piece by Terry Brunner, USDA NM Rural Development state director, on biofuels that was published Jan. 24. He posits the continued myth that consumers have something to be gained from such fuels, a position even Al Gore has backed away from.
The ethanol lobby has picked the taxpayers' pockets for about 25 years now, sucking off the federal budget, and is still unable to stand on its own two feet.
The lame-duck Congress handed another $5 billion or $6 billion to the industry just before it was sent packing at the end of 2010.
If biofuels were intended to be a profit-making business, it would have been closed down years ago, unable to fulfill its mission. Instead, the very powerful agricultural lobby keeps it alive, so farmers, both small and large, as well as distillers, grain co-ops and others make out quite nicely at taxpayer expense. This is a sham, a total rip-off of the American taxpayer.
In 2001, only about 7 percent of corn production went to ethanol. By 2010, this number had risen to almost 40 percent, a result of deliberate policies designed to subsidize ethanol.
This is production that does not go to food or to animal feed stocks, so grain, cereal and food prices tend to rise due to decreased supply. Chicago Board of Trade March corn futures at $6.67 a bushel are now at an almost three-year high and have risen 50 percent from just one year ago.
Ethanol contains just 80 percent of the energy of a gallon of gasoline, so the consumer would need 1.2 gallons of ethanol to produce the same output as one gallon of gasoline. Even if the prices per gallon were the same — they are not, ethanol is somewhat higher — where is the economic sense in investing in a fuel that would increase your cost by a minimum of 20 percent?
Worse, a gallon of ethanol takes approximately 131,000 BTUs of energy to produce but puts out only 77,000 BTUs. Why would anyone invest in such a losing proposition? It makes no sense.
There are many who insist biofuels will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, another laughable claim.
Cornell University scientist David Pimentel calculates that if the entire U.S. corn crop went to produce ethanol — that means no breakfast cereal for people, no animal feed and definitely no popcorn at the movies — even then it would satisfy only about 4 percent of U.S. oil consumption.
Yet there are far too many who continue to believe the environmentalist myth that biofuels are the future. It is long past time we stop this nonsense, cut the ethanol lobby out of the taxpayers' wallets and get serious about developing our own oil resources, in a safe, sensible, economically viable way. Our country has already made huge strides in increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles.
Ethanol, and biofuels as a whole, do not achieve any of their stated policy goals and are nothing more than a drain on our country's financial resources and a gift to farmers.
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