True North

There are a wide range of sound scientific reason to object to ethanol; it uses too much water, it's bad for the environment and the energy created is not much greater than the energy expended to create this "fuel".

The San Francisco Chronicle reports today on a study that suggests burning ethanol as a vehicle fuel could produce more, not less, smog-forming ozone than gasoline. That's bad news for people with respiratory diseases such as asthma.

Nowhere is the growing clash between economic development and water conservation more evident than in the push to build ethanol plants that typically guzzle 3½ to 6 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced. Minnesota's 15 ethanol plants together consume about 2 billion gallons of water per year, and plants in Winthrop, Windom, Marshall and Granite Falls are straining available water resources.

Ethanol production in the United States has been steadily growing and is expected to continue growing. Many politicians see increased ethanol use as a way to promote environmental goals, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and energy security goals. This paper provides the first thorough benefit-cost analysis of increasing ethanol use beyond four billion gallons a year, and finds that the costs of increased production are likely to exceed the benefits by about three billion dollars annually. It also suggests that earlier attempts aimed at promoting ethanol would have likely failed a benefit-cost test, and that Congress should consider repealing the ethanol tariff and tax credit.

But the worst aspect of ethanol is that it is immoral. This concept may be hard to grasp in the United States where obesity is a much greater problem than hunger, but it becomes blatantly obvious if anyone dares to look past the groomed yards of Kenwood.

More than 854 million people in the world go hungry.

In developing countries nearly 16 million children die every year from preventable and treatable causes. Sixty percent of these deaths are from hunger and malnutrition.

In the United States, 11.7 million children live in households where people have to skip meals or eat less to make ends meet. That means one in ten households in the U.S. are living with hunger or are at risk of hunger.

That last statistic is stunning and I have some skepticism about it's accuracy, but even if it is off by 100%, we still have over 5 million children in the USA with hunger issues. When we burn the food that could feed these people, we increase the cost of the other foods that they buy, therefore increasing the number of hungry people.

Globally food riots are creating political instability and will cause even more violence and deaths, on top of the deaths from starvation, deaths the could have been avoided if we hadn't burned our food to make some people feel better about themselves.

Every time you fill up your tank with ethanol, you are directly responsible for the deaths of more children. We should encourage everyone to boycott not only ethanol, but the companies that create and sell ethanol.

Cross-posted at Anti-Strib. Comments welcome.