Fueling a Cleaner Spring
by Cara Taussig

When the crocuses start popping open, and the red wing blackbirds reappear in the tall grasses of the roadside ditches, it’s spring around here. And spring means it’s time to do some of those spring cleaning chores . . . at least, that’s what they say.
On the theme of spring cleaning, I was going to write about non-toxic household cleaners and how you can make your own. Chittenden Solid Waste District publishes a great little pamphlet of “Recipes for a safer home and a cleaner environment!” You can call them at 802-872-8111 to get one of these. With recipes for everything from all-purpose cleaners to wood polish, you can figuratively knock yourself out cleaning for pennies on the dollar compared with conventional cleaners, while literally not knocking yourself out in the process.
But then I saw this article in the dentist’s office that knocked me for a loop. The cover story of the April 7 issue of Time magazine screams: “The Clean Energy Myth.” Next to a giant corn cob wrapped in dollar bill, the piece proclaims: “Politicians and Big Business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they’re really doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse — and you’re paying for it.”
Outrageous, yes — but most of this proclamation didn’t surprise me. If we devote a bunch of our agricultural land to growing corn for fuel, then it stands to reason that less of that land would be devoted to growing corn, or anything else, for food.
It used to be that there were great surpluses of corn (to the tune of three BILLION bushels out of a total of 12 billion grown in 2004) that were exported or added to stockpiles, but that is dramatically changing. Iowa State researchers are predicting that this year there will be fewer than one billion bushels of surplus corn overall. So, the law of supply and demand dictates that corn prices will go up. The prices of eggs, dairy products and meat from cornfed animals are going up, too. Anything made with corn derivatives, such as corn starch and high-fructose corn syrup, which includes a lot of our packaged foods – it’s all up, up and away.
It makes sense to me that politicians and big business are pushing ethanol. After all, Iowa is an important election state for aspiring presidential candidates, and it also accounted for a billion of those surplus bushels of corn back in 2004. This year they will have only about 400 million, and next year they may need to import corn to fill the ethanol plants that are coming online. Jobs for the voters and record profits for agribusiness are the order of the day.
What knocked me for a loop was the idea that using ethanol makes global warming worse. I was aware of the debates about whether or not ethanol was a net energy gainer or loser. For instance, these days a barrel of oil invested in finding, extracting and refining more oil nets about 10 new barrels of oil. For ethanol from corn, the highly controversial figure is about one barrel of oil invested yields 1.7 barrels of ethanol fuel. Some researchers think it’s about 1:1, or perhaps even a net energy loser. But, regardless of the energy gained, or not, I had understood that at least the corn used in ethanol was capturing and sequestering as much carbon dioxide while it was growing as it was emitting when it was burned for fuel. So what gives?
It turns out that because the prices paid for corn have gone up so much in the U.S., it sets off a chain reaction that eventually results in the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon every year — far, far more than next year’s corn crop.
The long chain of unintended consequences almost mimics the song of “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone.” It goes like this: the price of corn goes up, so U.S. soybean farmers switch to growing corn; fewer soybeans means the price of soybeans goes up, too, so Brazilian soybean farmers expand their production into cattle pastures, displacing Brazilian cattle ranchers who then turn the Amazon rain forest into pasture land. So the Amazon Rain Forest is disappearing and not sequestering as much carbon dioxide so the globe is warming faster – exactly the opposite of what the use of biofuels was supposed to achieve in the first place.
The Time article claims that in just the last six months of 2007, the world lost an area of Brazilian rain forest the size of Rhode Island. In a similar vein, Indonesia has destroyed so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel fuel that it is now the third largest carbon emitter worldwide, up from twenty-first. Apparently, unless you are growing your biofuel feedstock on rooftops, in parking lots or deserts, whatever natural vegetation you supercede was likely sequestering far more carbon than the crop you’re growing. And the carbon “paybacks” can be long — like an estimated 167 years in the case of the deforestation resulting from corn-based ethanol.
The Vermont Biofuels Association, located in Middlebury, responded to just these concerns in a letter on its website (vermontbiofuels.org):
“We have always believed that for biodiesel and other biofuels to meet their potential, they should be produced and used as close to the feedstock source as possible, and that local ownership of the production and distribution matters . . . We now know that over the next ten years, using oilseed crops, Vermont could sustainably replace all of the diesel used in our agriculture sector (6.4 million gallons per year) and more than 50% of the protein that is annually imported to feed our dairies.”
VBA is also supporting research into promising next-generation feedstocks, such as algae and cellulosic feedstocks that don’t compete with precious food crops.
The question is, will these promising technologies be commercialized and replace the destructive technologies before we reach a tipping point from which it will take many generations to recover? Timing is everything, it seems. In the hopeful springtime, it also seems possible if we act with intention.
In the meantime, I think I’m going to do some cleaning with some non-toxic stuff. Then I might write some letters to Congress for good measure. Spring cleaning doesn’t have to be limited to our homes, it can also be good for our House of Representatives.