The Environmental Costs of Corn-Based Ethanol
November 26, 2013
Story at-a-glance
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In 2007, Congress passed a law requiring gasoline to be mixed
with ethanol, to reduce dependence on foreign oil and promote
environmentally friendly biofuels
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Corn is the primary source of ethanol in the United States, and
this, ironically, has turned out to have devastating
consequences for the environment
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In response to rising demand for corn, American farmers are
converting environmentally valuable grasslands into corn fields
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In 2010, for the first time, fuel was the number one use for
corn in America, which means agricultural subsidies are now in
large part being used to subsidize our energy needs rather than
food
By Dr. Mercola
I’ve written extensively about the high price of
genetically engineered (GE) crops
on human health and ecosystems, and these ramifications are becoming
increasingly well-known.
I’ve also railed against the flawed agricultural subsidies that
promote the propagation of GE corn and soy, both of which can now be
found in most processed foods. But the problems with corn, and GE
corn in particular, do not end there.
In 2007, Congress passed a law requiring gasoline to be mixed
with ethanol, ostensibly to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Ethanol was also a major part of Obama’s presidential platform for
“green” energy, which he touted as the answer to global warming.
While the pesticide producers and junk food manufacturers continue
to pound their purpose to 'feed the world', they seem to completely
dismiss that we've destroyed millions of acres of wildlife to
accommodate our federal mandate to grow 'fuel' instead of food.
I think we all understand quite clearly that most nutritional needs
have nothing to do with the capacity to grow food, we already have
resources to grow plenty of nutritional food for the planet if
that's what we were really trying to accomplish.
The US agriculture policy ensures our failure, designed by the
interests of pesticide and junk food corporations to produce profits
and not nutrition. What better example than burning food for
fueling our engines? How does this help feed the world?
Corn is the primary source of
ethanol in the United States, and this, ironically, has turned
out to have devastating consequences for the environment. Converting
food into fuel is also a facet of the “green” movement that even
communist dictator Fidel Castro warned against:1
“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, Bush predicted it would make the
country ‘stronger, cleaner and more secure,’ the featured
article2
states.
“Historically, the overwhelming majority of corn in the
United States has been turned into livestock feed. But
in 2010, for the first time, fuel was the No. 1 use for corn in
America. That was true in 2011 and 2012.
Newly released Department of Agriculture data show that,
this year, 43 percent of corn went to fuel and 45 percent went
to livestock feed.” [Emphasis mine]
Needless to say, the more corn is used for ethanol, the more corn
our farmers have to plant in order to meet demands for food and
animal feed. In response to this rising demand, American farmers are
converting everything from environmentally valuable grasslands to
critically important pristine virgin lands into corn fields.
The Environmental Consequences the White House Didn’t Account for in
Its Green Plan
The ethanol boom has come at a far higher price than the US
government is willing to admit. Millions of acres of conservation
land has been destroyed—converted into corn fields.
According to the featured article in the Star Tribune,
five million acres of conservation land have disappeared while Obama
has been in office. To put that into perspective, that’s more than
the Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined.
More corn acres also mean more fertilizers being spread over
greater areas and a further decimation of our valuable top soil
along with continued mismanagement of dwindling water resources.
In just five years, (between 2005 and 2010), American corn
farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizers by more than
one billion pounds. As a result, many areas now have to address
increasingly polluted drinking water.
In Minnesota, for example, about a dozen communities so far have
spent millions of dollars to clean toxic nitrogen from their water
supplies, and according to a recent government report, reducing the
high levels from the state’s water supplies would require massive
changes in how farmers grow their crops.
Implementing these changes could cost upward of $1 billion a
year. According to executive director of the Minnesota Environmental
Partnership, Steve Morse:
"We're doing more to address water quality, but we are
being overwhelmed by the increase in production pressure to
plant more crops.”
Industrial monoculture farming practices as a whole pose a
tremendous threat to water supplies, in multiple ways, whether
through contamination or by depleting what little fresh water is
available. And far from being a solution, GE crops make matters even
worse, as they end up needing more agricultural chemicals
than other crops, and typically require more water.
Fresh Water Reserves Also Depleted by Agricultural Irrigation...
Besides contamination by crop fertilizers, fresh water reserves
are also being outright depleted by agricultural irrigation. An
article in Harper’s Magazine3
published in the summer of 2012 highlighted the rapid depletion of
the Ogallala Aquifer—the largest subterranean water supply in the
United States.
“Until the Second World War, the Ogallala went almost
entirely untapped... It wasn’t until the 1940s, when a variety
of new technologies coalesced on the plains, that large-scale
irrigation sprang up for the first time—but from there, the
transformation was quick.
Within a decade thousands of wells were drilled, creating a
spike in productivity as unprecedented as it was
unsustainable... [D]uring the early 1990s, farmers throughout
the Great Plains began to notice a decline in their wells.
Irrigation systems from the Dakotas to Texas dipped, and, in
some places, have been abandoned entirely.”
According to Kevin Mulligan, a professor at Texas Tech University
who leads the effort to monitor the Ogallala, available water in the
aquifer has gone down by about 80-100 feet in just the past 15
years, and none of the water is likely to be replenished. A mere 20
years from now, it’s unlikely that any irrigated agriculture will be
possible on the high plains—the water will be all gone.
Rivers and Gulf of Mexico Suffer from Toxic Agricultural Runoff
The billions of pounds of fertilizer being used on all of these
corn fields are also contaminating rivers, and contribute to an
ever-expanding dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico—a zone, currently the
size of Connecticut, that is too toxic to support aquatic life.
“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,” Star Tribune4
reports.
“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. “
Upon closer analysis, it seems the White House “green” agenda
amounts to little more than another gift to the pesticide industry,
spearheaded by Monsanto. It’s certainly not saving the environment.
Instead, Monsanto is rolling in dough courtesy of increased sales of
its patented genetically engineered Roundup Ready corn... According
to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, ethanol is “good for
business.” He claims it’s good for farmers, which from a financial
perspective, it might be. But overall, the corn-for-ethanol agenda
is nothing short of an ecological disaster that is costing us far
more than money.
The World Is Running Out of Topsoil
A decade ago, farmers were paid about $70 annually per acre to
enter the conservation program, which meant leaving their farmland
idle and improve the soil fertility with cover crops. From an
environmental perspective, this is important, as conservation lands
trap carbon in the soil and prevent topsoil erosion. Grasslands also
naturally convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, which is what you
might call a “staple” for human life on Earth. The world may in fact
be running out of usable topsoil, the layer that allows plants to
grow.
According to an article in Time World,5
soil erosion and degradation rates suggest we have only about 60
remaining years of topsoil. Forty percent of the world's
agricultural soil is now classified as either degraded or seriously
degraded; the latter means that 70 percent of the topsoil is gone.
Our soil is being lost at 10 to 40 times the rate it can be
replenished, and our agricultural systems are to blame, which
epitomizes the term "unsustainable."
It takes decades or even centuries to regenerate significant
levels of soil. This is the exact converse environmental effect an
environmentally friendly biofuel is supposed to contribute
to...Strategies like using rock dust powders, biochar, no till
farming, and biological inoculants can help reverse this trend if
they are started soon enough.
Agriculture as a whole also accounts for 70 percent of our fresh
water use. When the soil is unfit, water is wasted—it washes right
through the soil and past the plant's root system. We already have a
global water shortage that's projected to worsen over the next 20 to
30 years, so this is the last thing we need to compound it. Soil
degradation is projected to cause 30 percent loss in food production
over the next 20 to 50 years—while our global food demands are
expected to increase by 50 percent over this span
of time. All of these things considered, should we really
keep growing so much corn to fuel our cars?
Many don't realize that soil is alive and has an incredible
diversity of microorganisms. One handful of soil contains more
microbes than the number of people who have ever lived on our
planet.
These organisms create a powerful synergy with the plants and
recycle organic material, making the soil more resilient and better
at holding water and nutrients, and better at nurturing plants.
Microbes need carbon for food, and we're depleting our soil of this
element by using chemical fertilizers, overgrazing, over-ploughing,
and burning stubble in fields to accelerate crop turnover. Add to
this genetically engineered crops, and our soil—which is crucial for
growing nutrient-dense foods—is dealt another deathblow. In fact,
reduced soil fertility could lead to famine on a scale never
previously seen.
Ethanol—The Green Alternative That Demolishes the Environment
By law, biofuels are supposed to be at least 20 percent greener
than gasoline. Ethanol, based on corn, didn’t meet this criteria at
first. As reported in the featured article, certain assumptions were
made about the price of corn, the number of acres planted, and the
yield from each acre, in order to squeeze ethanol into the green
category.
“The most important of those assumptions was called the
yield, a measure of how much corn could be produced on an acre
of land. The higher the yield, the easier it would be for
farmers to meet the growing demand without plowing new farmland,
which counted against ethanol in the greenhouse gas equation,”
Star Tribune writes.
This is where genetically modified seeds really gained a
stronghold. Pesticide producers like Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer
stepped in, promising yields could be dramatically increased by
using genetically modified corn. If each farmer could produce more
corn on less acreage, environmental effects would be reduced. Inept
(if not outright corrupt) politicians bought this line of nonsense
hook line and sinker. In the end, yields per acre didn’t increase,
but the price of corn did, more than doubling between August of 2010
and this year, thanks to ethanol now being added to gasoline. The
dramatic rise in price per bushel spurred farmers to exit the
conservation program. As stated in the featured article:6
“America could meet its ethanol demand without losing a
single acre of conservation land, Energy officials said. They
would soon be proven wrong. Before the government ethanol
mandate, the Conservation Reserve Program grew every year for
nearly a decade. Almost overnight, farmers began leaving the
program, which simultaneously fell victim to budget cuts that
reduced the amount of farmland that could be set aside for
conservation. In the first year after the ethanol mandate, more
than 2 million acres disappeared. Since Obama took office, 5
million more acres have vanished.”
Virgin Land, Air and Water—All Is Being Contaminated by Corn-Based
Biofuel Needs
As reported by Mother Jones7
earlier this year, this conversion of grasslands to crop fields is
the exact opposite of what might be in our best interest.
“...to get ready for climate change, we should push
Midwestern farmers to switch a chunk of their corn land into
pasture for cows. The idea came from a paper8
by University of Tennessee and Bard College researchers, who
calculated that such a move could suck up massive amounts of
carbon in soil—enough to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions
from agriculture by 36 percent. In addition to the CO2
reductions, you'd also get a bunch of high-quality, grass-fed
beef...Turns out the Midwest are doing just the opposite.”
What’s worse, farmers started sacrificing virgin land to grow
even more corn. According to the Department of Agriculture, an
estimated 38,000 acres of previously untouched land vanished below a
sea of corn rows in 2012 alone. The Associated Press, using
government satellite data, estimates at least 1.2 million acres of
virgin land has been converted since 2006 (the year before the
ethanol legislation was passed)—and that’s just in the states of
Nebraska and the Dakotas!
The ethanol legislation requires the US Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) to study the effects of the ethanol initiative on water
and air pollution. Alas, such studies have not been done. Despite
the complete lack of investigation, Vilsack9
recently stated that "There is no question air quality, water
quality is benefiting from this industry.”
What’s the Answer
While I normally suggest you combat the broken agricultural
system by purchasing organically and locally grown foods, the answer
is more complex when it comes to avoiding corn-based ethanol. If you
drive a car that runs on gasoline, you’re supporting the ethanol
industry whether you really want to or not. One answer might be to
invest in an electric hybrid, but the rare earth minerals that must
be mined for the batteries are something to be considered in this
decision. In many areas, you may also be powering your "electric"
car from a power plant using coal.
I believe we must all become more involved in the political process
that permits these poorly thought-through policies to go through in
the first place, and combat the political inertia that keeps them in
place once it becomes obvious that they’re doing more harm than
good.
© Copyright 1997-2013 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.
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