Ethanol & The Environment: Adding to Bradley's Chapter on "Oil & The Environment"

The recent acceptance in mainstream politics of the threats created by global warming has complicated the already complex issues which Bill Bradley discusses in his chapter on "Oil and the Environment."  He devotes only a few passages to this recent enthusiastic embrace of ethanol production, but his words of caution are appropriate.  Similarly, his advocacy for expanding and strengthening the Kyoto Protocol points to the most promising remedy for the problems this trend will create.

            Bradley's concern over geopolitical ramifications from dependence on oil as well as dangers created by resource depletion from overuse also play out in this latest ethanol craze, which is of particular interest to me, having just written about the Amazon in the age of globalization.  Shifting energy sources from non-renewable petroleum to plant-based ethanol may alleviate our dependence on politically unacceptable oil-producing countries, but, in its present incarnation, it does little to better our prospects for land preservation or controlling global warming.

            In the United States, we have seen a rush to shift land use from corn-for-food to corn-for-fuel.  As a geopolitical issue, this has raised numerous concerns.  The alarming increase in corn prices has taxed Mexico's poor, and they have responded with mass protests against the ethanol-inflation factor.  In the United States, farmers have begun to lobby against the incentives to take land away from food production, as it increases their feed costs.  The American consumer will bear the brunt of those increases.

            These sacrifices might be tolerable if there were trade-offs in reductions of greenhouse gases and dependence on foreign oil, but these benefits appear elusive.  A recent Washington Post article pointed out that the fossil fuel energy needed for conversion of corn into ethanol, a very inefficient production, is so great that the net effect of savings in release of greenhouse gases is only about "15 percent."  Sugar cane-based ethanol from Brazil, which can be converted by burning the cane's residue "releases 80 percent less greenhouse cases than gasoline," a significantly more positive use of alternative fuel sources.  But the American Midwest is corn-growing, not adaptable to growing sugar cane.  And in an act of protectionism for their constituencies, rather than yielding to the realities of a market-based globalized economy, Congress has seen fit to impose a 54 cent per gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol.

            Bradley points out that even a shift to any ethanol production will have attendant costs.  As more land is taken from the food cycle for the fuel cycle, more land will need to be put into production; after all, people are not going to stop eating just because alcohol is powering their cars.  This is where my interest intersects with Bradley's views of America's needs for energy independence and preservation of the environment.  This new land in production has been cleared, at an alarming rate, in the Amazon.  The conversion from rain forest to crop land robs us of the rich biodiversity that has evolved in the Amazon, undisturbed from the beginning of time.  And the conversion entails a cycle of destruction-through fire and destroyed plant life-that increases greenhouse gas emissions, requiring scores of years to offset it through use of ethanol instead of petroleum.  In short, the biggest threat to the environment comes from our efforts to clean up the environment of fossil fuel pollution.

            Connecting the United States to the Amazon reminds us, as Bradley points out throughout his book, that the world has become globalized in multiple ways, and the environment is one of them.  To butcher an old political adage, "When the American farmer sneezes, the Amazon catches cold."  So, the solutions need to be globally based, and the Kyoto Protocol comes as close to staving off this dangerous cycle as any current idea.  Bradley's proposal for strengthening Kyoto with "cap and trade" programs makes sense.  It also needs to be expanded by including tropical rain forests in its ambit.  When this idea first was presented, the Europeans fought it, claiming that allowing the United States to purchase credits through tropical forest preservation wasn't nearly as punitive to its industry as forcing it to purchase expensive pollution controls.  The Brazilians themselves fought it, fearful that restrictions on its use of the Amazon would restrict development.  Hopefully, the world has become more enlightened as it considers the renewal of Kyoto.

            The environmental issue highlights the complexity and scope of today's problems and their interconnectedness across national boundaries.  The next generation of leadership will have to understand the solutions often beget problems, and the physical and temporal horizons for these solutions have expanded as the world has shrunk. 

Mark London is the co-author of The Last Forest published by Random House.