I don't believe I've taken as much flack on any single topic as I have from fellow conservationists on the issue of biofuels. My repeated warning that such fuels have extremely limited potential for solving the world's energy problems has generated significant push-back from people who believe in these products and technologies. Some environmental campaigns are based almost entirely upon the viability of such technology and upon the assumption that greater reliance upon biofuels will protect the environment and the planet.

Pasted below is an editorial from today's Salt Lake Tribune that is short, sweet and on target.

Scott

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http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3996312

Salt Lake Tribune Editorial:

Energy illusions: Time to end subsidies for ethanol pipe dream

A national mindset that has never quite abandoned the illusion that America can drill its way out of its energy woes is now drifting closer to the idea that we might grow our way out.

The idea certainly has its appeal. Deriving motor fuel from corn - or, someday, from otherwise useless agricultural by-products - could reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil and could provide us with a replacement for gasoline that burns cleaner and will never be exhausted.

Yet that dream has been no more than that for some three decades. It is a dream that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars with no discernible return on investment, unless your investment has been in Archer Daniels Midland stock.

Expensive new fuels are a better idea than conservation only if they pay for themselves, if they don't give billions of tax dollars to agribusiness giants such as ADM to reward them for making something we barely use - ethanol - out of something we have way too much of - corn.

We don't make ethanol from corn because it is efficient. Brazil does a lot better making it from sugar. And we don't use corn because it is environmentally friendly. Growing it sucks up huge amounts of energy and water and leaves tons of chemicals adrift in the ecosystem.

We make ethanol mostly out of corn because it is astoundingly plentiful, thanks to decades of heavy federal subsidies.

Cheap corn, and the federal tax credit of 51 cents a gallon to ethanol brewers, have made it worth ADM's while to make ethanol. And The New York Times counts 39 new ethanol plants under construction.

None of this is market-based or ecologically driven. It has been calculated that growing corn for fuel is a net loss of energy, given all the fossil fuels burned in growing, treating, irrigating, fertilizing, shipping, drying and refining the crop.

It has also been figured that fueling large parts of the American economy with corn-based ethanol would suck up half of the nation's viable farmland as it raised the price of groceries.

The energy saved by serious conservation measures will far outpace any energy gained through subsidized, uneconomical technologies. Even those that seem as natural as pouring corn in the gas tank.

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