the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" shows the rest of M$M how to regurgitate Disinformation

[JohnWxy]

ON January 28, the Newshour aired a nicely crafted bit of disinformation with the piece entitled "In Iowa, Questions Arise on Impact of Ethanol Production".

It is a fairly meandearing bit of persuasive pseudo journalism which attempts to implant conclusions in the mind of the uncritical viewer - conclusions implied but never really supported with facts or valid scientific analysis and certainly no debate of issues pro and con.

The position piece (provided, no doubt free of charge to the Newshour by the group Climate Central) is crafted to look and sound like an unbiased report on an issue, with a "reporter" Heidi Cullen:


"HEIDI CULLEN, Climate Central: Here in Iowa, they say corn is king, and with good reason. Iowa is the nation's largest producer of corn.

Over the last several years, Iowa has also become the nation's leading producer of corn ethanol. Cultivating corn for ethanol triggered big changes in farming practices.

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THen we are treated to edited pieces of Ms. Cullen interviewing a farmer "we don't here Ms. Cullen's questions (leading perhaps?) only the farmers "answers":


CRAIG GRIFFIEON, farmer, Iowa: Farming's like going to Las Vegas and -- and rolling the dice and losing it on the tables or playing blackjack, except it takes nine months to lose it. So the house always wins, yes.

HEIDI CULLEN: Craig Griffieon and his wife, LeVon, are sixth-generation farmers in Ankeny, Iowa, who know all about those changes in farming practices and fortunes.

CRAIG GRIFFIEON: I'm making more money doing it with the chemicals.

NOte the statement "who know all about those changes in farming practices and fortunes" the impression the viewer is supposed to take away is the changes came with the growing of corn FOR ETHANOL. But Mr. Griffieon's family have been farming for six generations. Could it be these changes were made before 2005(see below)? Actually, as pretty much anybody knows, farmers have been using chemical fertilizers (for more crops than just corn, by the way) for at least a couple of decades - long before 2005. Actually, the adoption of chemical fertilizers by farmers occurred long before the biofuel mandates were enacted.

back to Ms. Cullen:


HEIDI CULLEN: Hoping to improve the odds for farmers, Congress in 2005 created the renewable fuel standard. It mandates that 9 billion gallons of corn ethanol be produced in 2008, climbing to 15 billion by 2015. Farmers like Dennis Bogaards are grateful.


Here we see the Renewable fuels standard presented solely as a gift to farmers ("Farmers like Dennis Bogaards are grateful" As if the move to promote production of renewable fuels had no other rationale but to give farmers a gift. No mention of the very real concerns over the US's deep dependence on imported oil and what that means to our economic and straategic security. ONe of the proponents of the US developing renewable fuels is James Woolsey, retired director of the CIA who has been very concerned about how our dependence on foreign oil puts our security in jeopardy.


So while they are trying to say growing corn for ethanol produced significant changes in farming practices (in particular the use of chemical fertilizers) that is patently false.

And, they have stated flatly that the Renewable Fuels Standard and the move to promote production of renewable fuels was soley predicated upon a desire to help farmers out. And that there was no concern for Energy security behind the move to build a renewable fuels capacity in the U.S. This too is also false and is deceptive distortion of the issue.

The statement is made that about one third of the corn crop in 2008 went for the production of ethanol. First of all, if you take the 9.3 billion gallons of ehtanol expected to be produced in 2008 (I had to extrapolate for two months) and divide by 2.8 gallons of ethanol per bushel (the current yield of ethanol per bushel of corn) you get a figure for bushels of corn which is closer to 27%. But that simple approach IGNORES ONE VERY IMPORTANT FACT. Only the starch portion of the corn is used to make ethanol. ALL the protein in the corn is captured and becomes a feed supplement for cattle which has about three times the protein density of corn. The only part of that 27% of the corn harvest that is lost to ethanol production is the starch. However you choose to weight the starch loss, saying one third of the corn crop went to making ethanol is is deceptive. It requires you to completely ignore all the protein that was recovered from thet corn in making the ethanol.

back to the "report":


Other countries adversely affected

HEIDI CULLEN: Scientists studying climate change are equally concerned with how increased ethanol production in Iowa may be affecting land use in other parts of the world. They say the switch from soy to corn in Iowa has contributed to the rise in the global price of soybeans; that has led farmers around the world to plant additional acres of soybeans and profit from higher prices, possibly cutting down trees to do so, and thereby emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

These satellite images show the rapid rate of deforestation in Brazil from 2000 to 2007. Global deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions and is directly tied to climate change.

NOw here the transcript doesnt't show it but in the broadcast they flash, almost subliminally, a shot of Timothy Searchinger's article (I wouldn't call it a study) which purports to show that increased cultivation of corn for ethanol is causing rampant land use changes world-wide. There is criticism of these papers by scientists. MOre on this below.

NOte that credible studies of deforestation show that it is actually is illegal logging that starts it off. After that, local people come in an farm the land for their own food needs. Actaully, there is no evidence of anybody chopping down trees in order to grow plants to make ethanol.

Now, back to the persuasion, uhhh, i mean,, report:


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Although the price of soybeans is now dropping, some scientists believe that the damage may have already been done. But some Iowans say it's not that simple.

DAVID MILLER, Iowa Farm Bureau: Burdening domestic fuel policy with decisions that are made of local land use by people outside of our policy realm troubles me.

HEIDI CULLEN: David Miller is director of research and commodity services for the Iowa Farm Bureau in West Des Moines. He thinks academic researchers studying global land-use patterns are not only making a tenuous leap from Iowa to elsewhere, but are also undermining U.S. farm policy and the commitment to biofuels.

DAVID MILLER: They want to use the factors that came out of that study and put them into regulations and say, "These coefficients are, in fact, the ones that ought to be used to determine the greenness, if you will, of U.S. biofuels."

HEIDI CULLEN: In other words, he believes what happens in Iowa should stay in Iowa.

OR,,, "in other words" Mr. Miller is just thinking of Iowa and to hell with the rest of the world. But what Ms. Cullen and Climate Central is leaving out is the very serious criticisms (mentioned above) of the "studies" (Searchinger's and Tilman's) alleging to link deforestation with increased bifuel production. Buce Dale, Professor of Chemical Engineerinig at Michigan State University provides a succinct review and criticsm of these "studies".|www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x184934|(link)].


But the most egregious bit disinformation comes next.


HEIDI CULLEN: You start with what you think is 10 gallons of renewable energy, but when you account for the eight gallons of fossil fuel used to grow, harvest, and convert the crop to ethanol, you end up with only two gallons of green renewable energy.

Still, that is an improvement over gasoline from the standpoint of both energy and greenhouse gas emissions.

DAVID TILMAN: Corn ethanol was our first attempt at a biofuel. And once it was given serious scholarship, serious analysis, we realized it has some major flaws.



The statement: "but when you account for the eight gallons of fossil fuel used to grow, harvest, and convert the crop to ethanol, you end up with only two gallons of green renewable energy." is quitely simply a flat out lie and contradicts all legitimate studies of the energetics of ethanol production by scientists such as Michael Wang or the Argonne National Laboratory, Bruce Dale, Michigan State University and Hossein Shappouri ofthe U.S. Department of agricualature. The well known meta-analysis by Farrell and Kammen, Univ of Calif Berkeley showed that you actually get about 18-19 gallons of ehtanol for every one gallon os liguid fossil fuel consumed on the production of the ethanol http://rael.berkeley.edu/EBAMM/">link to meta-analysis.

This so called report was deceptive and ignored recognized facts about ethanol production. While land use changes are certainly something we need to be concerned about it has not been shown that increased production of ethanol has contributed to it.

With this "report", PBS (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) has certainly lost credibility as a serious unbiased source of news.

news hour transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june09/mixedyield_01-28.html

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. Since our problems are now way too complex for either the media or most of the public

to understand, I am sure that the vast majority of the media is relieved to take whatever they can get.

Years of shitty television and non stop ads have lowered the country's IQ by an insurmountable amount.

[JohnWxy]

2. Area of Amazonian Rainforest the size of Texas provisionally marked for oil & gas exploration

Amazonian rainforests covering an area almost as large as Texas provisionally marked for oil and gas exploration (from New Scientist magazine)

[JohnWxy]

3. HOw much of world agricultural land is devoted to producing ethanol from corn for the U.S.? 0.6%

In 2007/08, just 0.9 percent of world major cropland was needed (on a gross basis) to meet the grain requirements of the U.S. ethanol industry. When the production of feed co‐products are factored
in, the net use of global cropland for U.S. ethanol production was 0.6 percent>



Increased productivity has a tremendous impact on agricultural land use. Using average global corn yields from 40 years ago (1967), more than 330 million hectares would be required to produce the world corn crop grown on 158 million hectares in 2007. In other words, it would have taken more than twice as much land in 1967 to grow a corn crop equivalent in size to the 2007 world corn crop.


What about use of chemical fertiliers in farming? It's usage rate is declining

Data also suggests that nutrient leaching from agricultural lands, the process by which residual nutrients are dissolved and carried away by water, is on the decline. Fertilizer runoff from Midwestern fields has long been believed to be a source of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Hypoxia is the depletion of dissolved oxygen in water, a condition resulting from an overabundance of nutrients that stimulate the growth of algae, which in turn die and require large amounts of oxygen as the algae decompose.

According to recent data from the Environmental Protection Agency, average annual nitrogen discharges from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River Basins to the Gulf of Mexico decreased 21 percent from the reference period of 1980‐1996 to the period of 2001‐2005.22 According to the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI), this data provides “…reason to believe that declines in discharge of nitrogen and phosphorous to the Gulf of Mexico are proceeding through voluntary actions by farmers, their advisors, and their suppliers.”23 The IPNI report further found that “…farmers and practitioners are increasingly implementing fertilizer best management practices.”

Further, an increasing number of farmers are practicing conservation tillage practices, which reduce soil disruption and erosion. According to the Conservation Technology Information Council, nearly 55
percent of reporting cropland was engaged in some form of conservation tillage, up from 34 percent in
1990.24 Conservation tillage practices also reduce the amount of fossil fuel energy required to conduct field preparation. Perhaps the most important benefit of conservation tillage is that it reduces the release of carbon stored in the soil.


Should we pretend there are no co-products (high protein animal feed) produced in the ethanol from corn process?

Ethanol production uses only the starch portion of the corn kernel, while the remaining protein, fat, and
other nutrients, vitamins and minerals are passed through the process into the distillers grains.
Accordingly, only a portion of every hectare of grain “dedicated” to ethanol production is actually used
for biofuel production. The remaining portion of the hectare is more accurately characterized as
producing livestock feed. The protein and fat content of distillers grains is typically three times higher
than the protein and fat content of the original corn, making distillers grains a nutrient‐dense and
valuable feed product.

Full report: UNDERSTANDING LAND USE CHANGE AND U.S. ETHANOL EXPANSION - Renewable Fuels Association

also see: http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/AF/527.pdf">Update of Distillers Grains Displacement Ratios for Corn Ethanol Life-Cycle Analysis - Salil Arora, May Wu, and Michael Wang, Argonne National Laboratory - U.S. Dept. of Energy