Why the Sierra Club is right about Obama's deadly biofuel plans

[Christopher Calder]

The United States is slowly but inexorably running out of two essential ingredients for producing food, topsoil for plants to grow in, and phosphates to make fertilizer. At some point in the second half of the 21st century, our ability to grow vast amounts of grain in the American Midwest will be so diminished that our society may simply collapse, just as the Mayan Empire collapsed in the 9th century. The per capita human food production capacity of the world has been in steady decline for years due to the expected stresses of an expanding population on finite agricultural resources, combined with a massive and unnecessary diversion of food products that feed a cancerous, energy inefficient global biofuel industry.

Growing corn for ethanol eats up huge amounts of phosphate based fertilizers, and greatly increases the speed at which topsoil erodes. Half of America’s Midwest food growing capacity in the form of vital topsoil is now peacefully resting at the bottom of the Mississippi, Atchafalaya, and other rivers, and at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Topsoil is washed away by wind and rain when farmers disturb soil to grow crops. We obviously need food farming to survive, but nonessential biofuel production provides little net energy gain and skyrockets food prices. Biofuels only provide positive benefits to the large corporations who manufacture them, and who lobby our political leaders to protect their destructive business.

If things were not bad enough, both Barack Obama and environmentalist guru Amory Lovins now want to increase the rate of erosion by using so-called “crop residue” to make costly, energy inefficient cellulosic ethanol. This tactic will rob our soils of nutrients, making them less fertile and requiring the use of even more phosphate based fertilizers. Also lost will be the normally plowed under plant fibers needed to hold soils together, which ward off further erosion. In effect, both Lovins and Obama wish to mine our topsoil for hydrocarbon energy, just as they have supported drilling our human food supply for carbohydrate energy in the past.

Large scale biofuel production began in the United States at the urging of Amory Lovins and an agricultural industry hungry to make big profits. In 1976, Foreign Affairs magazine published Amory Lovins's seminal pro-biofuel article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken," which Lovins later expanded into his book, "Soft Energy Paths." When President Jimmy Carter welcomed Lovins into the Oval Office in 1978 for a friendly visit, Lovins's book was reportedly resting on the president's desk. President Carter signed the first ethanol biofuel subsidy bill in 1979, and biofuel production was continued under Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and greatly expanded by George W. Bush when he signed the now infamous Energy Independence and Security Act on December 19, 2007.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, farm belt politician Barack Obama was flown around the country on corporate jets owned by the giant corn-ethanol corporation, Archer Daniels Midland, better known as ADM. The late Tim Russert asked Obama on NBC's Meet The Press if he would “rethink” his ethanol biofuel policy in light of the obvious inflationary effect biofuel production was having on world food prices. Obama admitted that ethanol was a serious cause of food price inflation, and promised to review his policies. A few days later Obama toured a biodiesel factory with Joe Biden and declared it a great success. Obama was repeatedly warned about the destructive nature of biofuels by his own advisers, yet he continued to promote a disastrous energy policy in order to win the Iowa Caucus and the general election.

Even today, after all that has been discovered about how biofuel production pollutes the environment, increases greenhouse gas release, causes devastation of rainforests and destruction of animal habitat, Barack Obama almost unbelievably continues to champion the idea of turning our own food into fuel, and he wishes to expand ethanol production by allowing fuel blenders to increase the ethanol content of gasoline from 10% to 15%. This move will undoubtedly increase engine maintenance costs, as well as seriously escalate food price inflation. Obama has temporarily delayed his push for expanded corn-vodka fuel production only after a diverse group of 36 organizations objected to his recklessness. The group, called Follow The Science (FollowTheScience.org), includes the Sierra Club, the American Frozen Food Institute, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Friends of the Earth, and the National Resources Defense Council.

A record number of Americans now require food stamps just to survive, and Barack Obama is planning to cut food stamps benefits at the same time he wants to increase food costs by turning even more of it into fuel. Food supply security seem to be the very last thing on Barack Obama’s mind, and he does not appear to be losing any sleep over the many millions of deaths due to malnutrition and related illness that global biofuel production has caused over the years. Barack Obama seems to think that fighting his pride driven war in far away Afghanistan is vital, while protecting America’s food growing capacity is unimportant.

Causing starvation and fighting unnecessary wars are not positive Democratic Party values. We need to run a better Democrat against Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential primary election, because Obama has proven that when he gets a bad idea in his head, he sticks with it to the bitter end, probably out of pride and a desire not to admit that he has been wrong. Any Republican candidate could beat Barack Obama if the election were held today.

Suggested reading:

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN - Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phosphorus-a-looming-crisis

FOREIGN POLICY - Peak Phosphorus, by James Elser and Stewart White
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/20/peak_phosphorus

SEATTLE PI - The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/348200_dirt22.html

Cornell University CHRONICLE-ONLINE - 'Slow, insidious' soil erosion threatens human health and welfare as well as the environment, Cornell study asserts
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/march06/soil.erosion.threat.ssl.html

Food Versus Biofuels: Environmental and Economic Costs
http://www.springerlink.com/content/47705417208688m7

Crop Residue May Be Too Valuable to Harvest for Biofuels
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/542626/

NEW YORK TIMES - "Obama Camp Closely Linked With Ethanol”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/politics/23ethanol.html

*The Renewable Energy Disaster - My web site on all major energy issues
http://renewable.50webs.com/

[jpak]

1. Obama - MASS MURDERER!!!!1111 and Amory Lovins too!!1111

LaRouchian horseshit

fail

[Christopher Calder]

9. Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr.? Laughs

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr.? I thought he was dead. I had to look him up on Wikipedia to find out he was still alive.

Not my cup of tea at all.

[jpak]

11. Lyndon LaRouche is fond of wild conspiracy theories and grandiose fairy tales - hence 'LaRouchian'

and he claims to be a Democrat too.

Give us a link to all those dead people the Bad Obama and Amory Lovins killed with biofuels...

(laughs)

[Kolesar]

2. "...(Obama's) pride driven war in far away Afghanistan"?

Lost me there.

I do recall reading an article asking if the world was "phosphorous-limited". I think ending meat consumption is the first response to that.

[kenny blankenship]

3. The biofuels push looks so much like a family in a warzone, burning their heirloom furniture

just to keep warm. Formerly wealthy people reduced to desperate measures and who will probably never know security or comfort again.

If we could grow this stuff in algae tanks out in the desert, in a way so that current food production and prices would be unaffected, forests would not be plowed under, and topsoil loss not accelerated - that would be different. Topsoil and food would continue to be global concerns of course, but it would be the same problem as before, not compounded by fuels production.

[Christopher Calder]

7. Algae is only good for getting research grant money. Research is a business!

Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for all our biofuel problems, but we are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity. Researchers brag that algae can produce 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need an impossibly large number of acres (about 133 million acres) of concrete lined open-air algae ponds to meet our highway energy demands. Those schemes that grow algae in closed reactor vessels, without sunlight, necessitate the algae being fed sugars or starches as a source of chemical energy. The sugars or starches must then be made from corn, wheat, beets, or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka. If we construct genetically engineered super-algae that are capable of out-competing native algae strains that contaminate open air algae ponds, the new gene-modified algae will be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic results.

If we try to guard algae from contamination by growing them in sealed containers under glass or in plastic tubes, the construction costs for building large enough areas to collect sufficient sunlight would be prohibitive. Even then the containers are still subject to contamination over time, and must be periodically flushed and rinsed with chlorine or other caustic agent. The current cost of biodiesel made from algae is about $14.00 a gallon.

[Vinnie From Indy]

4. LOL

"Half of America’s Midwest food growing capacity in the form of vital topsoil is now peacefully resting at the bottom of the Mississippi, Atchafalaya, and other rivers, and at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico."

This line is so wildly insane one wonders if this is an article from The Onion.

[kristopher]

5. That is a typical example of the odd perspective of the OP poster...

[Christopher Calder]

10. My perspective?

My perspective is that people should not follow leaders blindly and only use the tape recorder function of their human brain. Most people only repeat what others have said and never analyze anything for themselves to see if it is actually true. This nation's political discussion on energy is full of nonsense and hype, and few people are really serious about solving our energy problems. Politicians want to get votes and get elected so they can live the life of an important man or woman. It is a big ego trip.

EXAMPLE

In the Oregon gubernatorial campaign a Republican named Chris Dudley is running on a platform that supports wind, solar, and wave energy. He even has a little windmill icon on his web site. He is doing this only because Oregon is such a green-hyped state that he thinks he cannot gain power unless he jumps on the renewable energy bandwagon to nowhere (or hell). It is not about facts, it is about perception. Dudely's only qualifications for being governor are that he was once a professional basketball player and he has diabetes. He cannot afford not to appear "green."

We need politicians and voters who analyze issues and understand them. Producing energy is very serious business that requires facts. You cannot design and fly in an airplane built on good intentions but bad mathematics. We need real energy solutions that actually work. You cannot eat symbolism, hype, and false campaign promises. FOOD EQUALS ENERGY AND ENERGY EQUALS FOOD. If we do not have affordable energy, we cannot have affordable food. The result of bad energy policy is economic collapse and hunger. That is already happening, and our food banks are low on supplies in part because of the cancerous global biofuel industry that is eating up mountains of food that people need to eat.

[kristopher]

13. Your mission - smear renewable energy and promote nuclear energy

[NickB79]

6. Why do you think it's insane?

Topsoil loss is a well-documented problem with modern agriculture. Just one example: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/348200_dirt22.html

""We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.""

snip

"The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced."

[Dead_Parrot]

12. It doesn't get a lot of popular press, though

The problem with soil loss (and soil acidification) is, that it's not one of the topics that gets wrapped up into the easy-to-swallow factoids that people like so much: You have to go and read, do some math and think to get a handle on it.

That's too much like hard work for most people. Including some DUers, it seems.

[Christopher Calder]

8. I wish your skepticism was valid!

When you try to grow both fuel and food at the same time, you greatly increase the rate of topsoil erosion, because disturbing the land by tilling and harvesting makes soils vulnerable to wind and rain. Globally, topsoil is being lost ten times faster than it is being replenished, and 30% of the world's arable land has become unproductive in the past 40 years due to erosion. The human race would quickly starve to death without topsoil, and the USA is in serious jeopardy of losing adequate food growing capacity within 100 years or less due to erosion. Biofuel production is helping clog the Mississippi and other rivers with topsoil from our prime growing areas. In 1850, Iowa prairie soils had about 12-16 inches of topsoil, but now have only about 6-8 inches. We are continuing to lose Iowa topsoil at a rate of approximately 30 tons of topsoil per hectare (10,000 square meters) per year. As it takes nature hundreds of years to replace just 1 inch of lost topsoil, ask biofuel advocates if helping to destroy the ability of future generations to grow food is a worthy environmental goal.