The Wall Street Journal's lead staff editorial yesterday criticizing Newt Gingrich's stance on ethanol was entitled Professor Cornpone. It's priceless. And, if true, completely reverses my earlier preferences for Gingrich as the GOP presidential candidate in 2012.
Apparently Gingrich lashed out at the Journal, indirectly, in a speech to the Renewable Fuels Association in Des Moines, Iowa. The editorial contends, early on,
"Mr. Gingrich explained that "the big-city attacks" on ethanol subsidies are really attempts to deny prosperity to rural America, adding that "Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it's working, and you wonder, 'What are their values?'"
Mr. Gingrich traced the roots of these supposed antipathies to the 1880s, an observation that he repeatedly tendered "as an historian." The Ph.D. and star pupil of futurist Alvin Toffler then singled out the Journal's long-held anti-ethanol views as "just plain flat intellectually wrong." "
I confess to not having known of the Toffler-Gingrich connection. But it doesn't matter. Gingrich is displaying an unfortunate politically-convenient streak in his remarks.
The piece continues,
"Here's how he put in Des Moines, with that special Gingrich nuance: "The morning that I see the folks who are worried about 'food versus fuel' worry about the cost of diesel fuel, worry about the cost of commodities on the world market, worry about the inflation the Federal Reserve is building into our system, all of which is going to show up as higher prices, worry about the inefficiencies of big corporations that manufacture and process food products—the morning they do that, I'll take them seriously."
The morning Mr. Gingrich read the offending editorial, if he did, he must have overlooked the part about precisely those concerns. He must have also missed our editorial last month raising the possibility that easy money was contributing to another asset bubble in the Farm Belt, especially in land prices. For that matter, he must have missed the dozens of pieces we've run in recent years critiquing Fed monetary policy.
Given that Mr. Gingrich aspires to be President, his ethanol lobbying raises larger questions about his convictions and judgment. The Georgian has been campaigning in the tea party age as a fierce critic of spending and government, but his record on that score is, well, mixed.
So along comes Mr. Gingrich to offer his support for Mr. Obama's brand of green-energy welfare, undermining House Republicans in the process. In his Iowa speak-power-to-truth lecture, he even suggested that the government should mandate that all new cars in the U.S. be flex-fuel vehicles—meaning those that can run on an ethanol-gas mix as high as 85%—as if King Corn were in any danger of being deposed.
Yet there are currently dozens of flex-fuel models on the market, and auto makers already get a benefit if they sell them, via the prior fuel-economy mandates that did so much to devastate Detroit. The problem is consumers rarely want to pay more for flex-fuel cars when they get 25% to 30% fewer miles per gallon with E85, according to Energy Department data.
Some pandering is inevitable in presidential politics, but, befitting a college professor, Mr. Gingrich insists on portraying his low vote-buying as high "intellectual" policy. This doesn't bode well for his judgment as a president. Even Al Gore now admits that the only reason he supported ethanol in 2000 was to goose his presidential prospects, and the only difference now between Al and Newt is that Al admits he was wrong."
Ouch! Being compared poorly to Al Gore should make Newt cringe.
Seriously, this piece has completely changed my view of the former Speaker of the House. His explanations concerning ethanol, which now soaks up immense amounts of corn that would have other uses, including food, are unbelievable. We don't need bogus uses for corn sending its price even higher when food inflation is on a tear.
I can't see Tea Partiers embracing a guy who calls for mandatory flex-fuel for all new US-made cars.
You can't make this stuff up. Could it really be that Gingrich's putative White House bid will founder on such a base slip-up as pandering to Iowa corn farmers by boosting ethanol subsidies?
Showing posts with label Ethanol. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethanol. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Monday, October 29, 2007
More Inconvenient Truth About Ethanol
Holman Jenkins' Wednesday Wall Street Journal article about the far left castigating Toyota for its stand on CAFE standards. Standing with other auto manufacturers who rely on large, less fuel-efficient, profitable cars that people actually want, to fund the sale of the "profitless Prius," Toyota is catching flack from the same greenies who buy its hybrid car.
To provide us with a better understanding of the issue, Holman distills it thusly,
"As car companies do, it sold Prius customers a car that met their needs and/or flattered their vanity. For other customers whose hot buttons lie elsewhere, Toyota has the Tundra, its giant, fuel-consuming pickup. Auto companies only achieve efficient scale by appealing to different consumer appetites. The profitless Prius wouldn't exist if not for the non-hybrids that keep Toyota in business. Indeed, Toyota supports the House bill over the Senate bill only because it would let auto makers continue to make big vehicles that happen to be the ones Americans, with their dollars, show they actually want.
But the 32-year-old CAFE rules have become a fetish of environmental groups, a talisman of their clout, a ticket to a seat at a table in Washington. The policy itself has no value: It doesn't reduce oil imports. It doesn't meaningfully curb fossil-fuel use.
In the nature of things, auto buyers amortize their forced investment in fuel economy by driving more miles, burning more gas. The impressive reliability gains of the auto makers over the past 30 years are in part a reflection of this consumer demand for more miles. Ditto the conspicuous increase in vehicle size and comfort, partly a function of the increased time motorists spend in their cars."
To illustrate an as-yet unrealized hypocrisy, Jenkins notes, further down in the piece, this tasty little morsel concerning what converting to ethanol will do for total greenhouse gas emissions,
"A recently passed Senate bill would require motorists to buy 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, up from 7.5 billion gallons under current law.
At least this would benefit the atmosphere, right? Think again. A research team featuring Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, recently showed that the intensive cultivation of biofuels in the U.S. and Europe produces up to 70% more greenhouse effect than the fossil fuels they displace (nitrous oxide, a byproduct of the fertilizers used, has nearly 300 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide).
Passenger cars can burn fuel consisting of 10% ethanol. If our goal were really to displace conventional gasoline, we'd open our coastal markets to sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil and other Southern Hemisphere countries, produced by less intensive methods that result -- irony alert -- in a genuine reduction in greenhouse emissions.
But Washington blocks imported ethanol with a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to protect domestic ethanol profits. So let's sum up the ways you're paying to prop up an industry that's bad for energy security and bad for climate worries: higher taxes, higher gas prices and higher food prices. Did we mention the 3% mileage penalty that comes from burning gasoline with a 10% ethanol content, thanks to ethanol's inferior BTU value compared to gasoline?"
I have to admit, I love the naive hypocrisy of the populist environmentalists.
They want less oil usage. They want to buy expensive hybrid technology cars cheaply, even though the cars still don't make economic sense to operate. They want fewer greenhouse emissions while also advocating ethanol.
But, as Crutzen's work demonstrates, there's a contradiction. Moe ethanol means more greenhouse gases to cultivate the biofuels, not to mention soil erosion and forest depletion, as mentioned here. In fact, I've read an article, the exact location of which escapes me just now, that more widespread use of ethanol is likely to lead to the accelerated disappearance of South American rainforests, the better to be replanted with biofuels.
Call me crazy, but isn't it nonsensical to use a lot of a major food source to replace a more efficiently-burning fossil fuel? We can't eat oil.
Between the water-intensive nature of ethanol production, its relative inefficiency for power generation, compared to petroleum-based products, and the devastation of more land to plant corn for ethanol, the green lobby and its citizen-followers are likely to wake up to an environmental mess sooner, rather than later.
Then there's the inflation in food costs that will result from this switch of a major consumable, corn, from foodstuff to auto fuel.
Hitting voters hard in their wallets is never a good way to secure their long term support for a still-unproven 'crisis,' i.e., scientifically proven, human-caused global warming.
To provide us with a better understanding of the issue, Holman distills it thusly,
"As car companies do, it sold Prius customers a car that met their needs and/or flattered their vanity. For other customers whose hot buttons lie elsewhere, Toyota has the Tundra, its giant, fuel-consuming pickup. Auto companies only achieve efficient scale by appealing to different consumer appetites. The profitless Prius wouldn't exist if not for the non-hybrids that keep Toyota in business. Indeed, Toyota supports the House bill over the Senate bill only because it would let auto makers continue to make big vehicles that happen to be the ones Americans, with their dollars, show they actually want.
But the 32-year-old CAFE rules have become a fetish of environmental groups, a talisman of their clout, a ticket to a seat at a table in Washington. The policy itself has no value: It doesn't reduce oil imports. It doesn't meaningfully curb fossil-fuel use.
In the nature of things, auto buyers amortize their forced investment in fuel economy by driving more miles, burning more gas. The impressive reliability gains of the auto makers over the past 30 years are in part a reflection of this consumer demand for more miles. Ditto the conspicuous increase in vehicle size and comfort, partly a function of the increased time motorists spend in their cars."
To illustrate an as-yet unrealized hypocrisy, Jenkins notes, further down in the piece, this tasty little morsel concerning what converting to ethanol will do for total greenhouse gas emissions,
"A recently passed Senate bill would require motorists to buy 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, up from 7.5 billion gallons under current law.
At least this would benefit the atmosphere, right? Think again. A research team featuring Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, recently showed that the intensive cultivation of biofuels in the U.S. and Europe produces up to 70% more greenhouse effect than the fossil fuels they displace (nitrous oxide, a byproduct of the fertilizers used, has nearly 300 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide).
Passenger cars can burn fuel consisting of 10% ethanol. If our goal were really to displace conventional gasoline, we'd open our coastal markets to sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil and other Southern Hemisphere countries, produced by less intensive methods that result -- irony alert -- in a genuine reduction in greenhouse emissions.
But Washington blocks imported ethanol with a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to protect domestic ethanol profits. So let's sum up the ways you're paying to prop up an industry that's bad for energy security and bad for climate worries: higher taxes, higher gas prices and higher food prices. Did we mention the 3% mileage penalty that comes from burning gasoline with a 10% ethanol content, thanks to ethanol's inferior BTU value compared to gasoline?"
I have to admit, I love the naive hypocrisy of the populist environmentalists.
They want less oil usage. They want to buy expensive hybrid technology cars cheaply, even though the cars still don't make economic sense to operate. They want fewer greenhouse emissions while also advocating ethanol.
But, as Crutzen's work demonstrates, there's a contradiction. Moe ethanol means more greenhouse gases to cultivate the biofuels, not to mention soil erosion and forest depletion, as mentioned here. In fact, I've read an article, the exact location of which escapes me just now, that more widespread use of ethanol is likely to lead to the accelerated disappearance of South American rainforests, the better to be replanted with biofuels.
Call me crazy, but isn't it nonsensical to use a lot of a major food source to replace a more efficiently-burning fossil fuel? We can't eat oil.
Between the water-intensive nature of ethanol production, its relative inefficiency for power generation, compared to petroleum-based products, and the devastation of more land to plant corn for ethanol, the green lobby and its citizen-followers are likely to wake up to an environmental mess sooner, rather than later.
Then there's the inflation in food costs that will result from this switch of a major consumable, corn, from foodstuff to auto fuel.
Hitting voters hard in their wallets is never a good way to secure their long term support for a still-unproven 'crisis,' i.e., scientifically proven, human-caused global warming.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Ethanol's Water Problems
Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal's main editorial was entitled "Ethanol's Water Shortage." That title says it all.
It turns out that a Cornell ecology professor has determined that each gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water.
As a result, Kansas and Nebraska are near a lawsuit over water rights. A North Dakota ethanol plant application was withdrawn when, according to the Journal,
"it became clear that the plant's million-gallon-a-day appetite would drain too much from a local aquifer."
Another method of measuring various energy sources, power density, finds oil to be more efficient than, say, solar, because it merely requires a hole in the ground, rather than acres of panels.
Solar power, which is 1,000 less dense than oil, is still 10x denser than ethanol. Peter Huber, of the Manhattan Institute,
"predicts a world-wide leveling of forestland as farmers turn vegetation into fuel,"
according to the Journal article. Even worse, the article cite two scientists, Renton Righelato and Dominick Spracklen, who wrote in Science magazine,
"in order to replace just 10% of gasoline and diesel consumption, the US would need to convert a full 43% of its cropland to ethanol production. The alternative approach- clearing wilderness- would mean more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than simply sticking with gasoline, because the CO2-munching trees cut down to make way for King Ethanol absorb more emissions than ethanol saves."
But, wait! Wasn't greenhouse gases and carbon footprints why we are going from oil to ethanol in the first place?
Let's hope, as the Journal editorial notes, that Congress figures this out before the last, big ethanol legislation pushes through. It's just too awful to contemplate- water shortages, more CO2, runoff, water pollution, higher food prices, etc. All in the name of replacing a very efficient fuel source- oil.
It turns out that a Cornell ecology professor has determined that each gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water.
As a result, Kansas and Nebraska are near a lawsuit over water rights. A North Dakota ethanol plant application was withdrawn when, according to the Journal,
"it became clear that the plant's million-gallon-a-day appetite would drain too much from a local aquifer."
Another method of measuring various energy sources, power density, finds oil to be more efficient than, say, solar, because it merely requires a hole in the ground, rather than acres of panels.
Solar power, which is 1,000 less dense than oil, is still 10x denser than ethanol. Peter Huber, of the Manhattan Institute,
"predicts a world-wide leveling of forestland as farmers turn vegetation into fuel,"
according to the Journal article. Even worse, the article cite two scientists, Renton Righelato and Dominick Spracklen, who wrote in Science magazine,
"in order to replace just 10% of gasoline and diesel consumption, the US would need to convert a full 43% of its cropland to ethanol production. The alternative approach- clearing wilderness- would mean more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than simply sticking with gasoline, because the CO2-munching trees cut down to make way for King Ethanol absorb more emissions than ethanol saves."
But, wait! Wasn't greenhouse gases and carbon footprints why we are going from oil to ethanol in the first place?
Let's hope, as the Journal editorial notes, that Congress figures this out before the last, big ethanol legislation pushes through. It's just too awful to contemplate- water shortages, more CO2, runoff, water pollution, higher food prices, etc. All in the name of replacing a very efficient fuel source- oil.
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