Are US politicians out of the mimd on ethanol production sources?

Question

Why they promote corn and other grains as sources instead sugarcanes which have at least 3X more efficient ethanol? Why use something will erode soil with the need of plenty of fertilizers while sugarcane only require little? Are they really for the environment or just plain naive? Perhaps they truly work for fossil-fuel corporations to prevent ethanol efficiency taking over?

Answer 1

They're just going where the easiest votes and campaign donations are, grain farmers in the midwest.  Just call them Big Corn instead of Big Oil.

Answer 2

read this about ethanol production

Only transient Aliens could have aproved that.

They are  intending to replace most of the indigenous Forrest's in the world ,with mono cultures for the production of Ethanol,

Non sustainable, chemically grown ,heavily irrigated (with water needed for communities)one specie Forrest's,that have only plagues of insects as fauna which are controlled with pesticides.

Killing all bio diversity,in both flora and fauna ,adding to the destruction and extinction of species ,like nothing we have ever seen before.

All in the quest for alternative energy and to save the Environment ,

The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.

"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, an environmental NGO based in Asunción, Paraguay. "We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.

Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms. Oil palm has become the world's number one fruit crop, well ahead of bananas.

Biodiesel offers many environmental benefits over diesel from petroleum, including reductions in air pollutants, but the enormous global thirst means millions more hectares could be converted into monocultures of oil palm. Getting accurate numbers on how much forest is being lost is very difficult.

The FAO's State of the World's Forests 2007 released last week reports that globally, net forest loss is 20,000 hectares per day -- equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris. However, that number includes plantation forests, which masks the actual extent of tropical deforestation, about 40,000 hectares (ha) per day, says Matti Palo, a forest economics expert who is affiliated with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.

"The half a million ha per year deforestation of Mexico is covered by the increase of forests in the U.S., for example," Palo told IPS.

National governments provide all the statistics, and countries like Canada do not produce anything reliable, he said. Canada has claimed no net change in its forests for 15 years despite being the largest producer of pulp and paper. "Canada has a moral responsibility to tell the rest of the world what kind of changes have taken place there," he said.

Plantation forests are nothing like natural or native forests. More akin to a field of maize, plantation forests are hostile environments to nearly every animal, bird and even insects. Such forests have been shown to have a negative impact on the water cycle because non-native, fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Pesticides are also commonly used to suppress competing growth from other plants and to prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality.

Plantation forests also offer very few employment opportunities, resulting in a net loss of jobs. "Plantation forests are a tremendous disaster for biodiversity and local people," Lovera said. Even if farmland or savanna are only used for oil palm or other plantations, it often forces the local people off the land and into nearby forests, including national parks, which they clear to grow crops, pasture animals and collect firewood. That has been the pattern with pulp and timber plantation forests in much of the world, says Lovera.

Ethanol is other major biofuel, which is made from maize, sugar cane or other crops. As prices for biofuels climb, more land is cleared to grow the crops. U.S. farmers are switching from soy to maize to meet the ethanol demand. That is having a knock on effect of pushing up soy prices, which is driving the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into soy, she says. Meanwhile rich countries are starting to plant trees to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide, called carbon sequestration. Most of this planting is taking place in the South in the form of plantations, which are just the latest threat to existing forests. "Europe's carbon credit market could be disastrous," Lovera said.

The multi-billion-euro European carbon market does not permit the use of reforestation projects for carbon credits. But there has been a tremendous surge in private companies offering such credits for tree planting projects. Very little of this money goes to small land holders, she says. Plantation forests also contain much less carbon, notes Palo, citing a recent study that showed carbon content of plantation forests in some Asian tropical countries was only 45 percent of that in the respective natural forests. Nor has the world community been able to properly account for the value of the enormous volumes of carbon stored in existing forests.

One recent estimate found that the northern Boreal forest provided 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services such as absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere and cleaning water. The good news is that deforestation, even in remote areas, is easily stopped. All it takes is access to some low-cost satellite imagery and governments that actually want to slow or halt deforestation. Costa Rica has nearly eliminated deforestation by making it illegal to convert forest into farmland, says Lovera.

Paraguay enacted similar laws in 2004, and then regularly checked satellite images of its forests, sending forestry officials and police to enforce the law where it was being violated. "Deforestation has been reduced by 85 percent in less than two years in the eastern part of the country," Lovera noted. The other part of the solution is to give control over forests to the local people. This community or model forest concept has proved to be sustainable in many parts of the world. India recently passed a bill returning the bulk of its forests back to local communities for management, she said.

However, economic interests pushing deforestation in countries like Brazil and Indonesia are so powerful, there may eventually be little natural forest left. "Governments are beginning to realize that their natural forests have enormous value left standing," Lovera said. "A moratorium or ban on deforestation is the only way to stop this."

This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

© 2007 IPS - Inter Press Service

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/...

Answer 3

read this and you'll understand.

http://greenarrowinvestments.com/greenga...

Answer 4

They are not for the environment, they are for power.

If we could grow sugar cane to the extent we could grow corn in the US we would.

Answer 5

Corn farmers and processors are a much larger voting block than sugar cane farmers/processors.  While sugar cane is grown on the U.S. Gulf coast, corn is grown all through the midwest as well as in the west.  Politicians are only interested in votes.  This is true everywhere, not just the U.S.

Some of your other statements, however, indicate a serious degree of ignorance, however.  For example, do you realize that the U.S. is in fact the largest producer of fuel grade ethanol?  Also, the sugar cane fields I saw in Texas and Louisiana used pretty much the same fertilizers as corn or cotton fields?  Commercial farmers are going to do what ever they can to maximize production.

Answer 6

The sad part is that any of us think that politicians actually know anything about alternate energy.

But I am sure that the pure data that they get from the PAC  is not skewed in any way toward the corporations that fund their elections.

I should not be surprised then that they don't know that there is not enough acres in the USA to grow the quantity of corn needed to fuel the fleet of vehicles we have on the roads now, much less in the future. That means that we will have to rely on other countries, like Venezuela or more likely Brazil, to supply our energy. Of course those countries would not hold us hostage over energy like OPEC is doing.

In the end ethanol, however it is made, it is still burned creating co2, the green house gas we are trying to avoid with alternate fuels. We need to do research on truely green fuels not stop gap measures.

Answer 7

Many of our legislators receive money from the producers of corn based ethanol such as Archer Daniels Midland.

That should answer your question.

Answer 8

You must live in Mexico or possibly South America... Sugar cane doesn't grow anywhere north of the Mason Dixon line here in the USA and I think you'll find it problematic even in the deep south.

Actually, I can show you figures for alcohol production from grasses that would surprise you, but very hard to actually produce.  

Algae would be a Superior form of un-esterfied bio-diesel, if you don't mind filling our deserts with ocean water and feeding the system with raw human sewage.

Bottom line, nothing is as simple as you've been led to believe.

Think Nuclear...

Answer 9

I have seen the faked graphs from the EPA:

They compare the efficieny from ethanol refineries with COGENERATION with regular refineries for biodiesel... how dishonest...

No energy-environmental decision from the US can surprise me anymore

Answer 10

The problem is that corn is grown on a much wider scale and is much more available.  It's cheaper in the short run.  And besides, politicians have never been much good at science.  I'll bite my tongue and stay quiet about Al Gore.