Word: ethanol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels...
...several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline...
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn...
...only beneficiaries of this folly are, of course, American farmers, who win both from high market prices and from subsidies dished out by a Congress desperate to look like it has some kind of solution to rising oil prices. But ethanol represents, on a broader level, the tendency to rush into high profile, fix-all “solutions” before we have fully analyzed the interdependency of all the elements involved. Instead of pursuing those modest, non-fanciful solutions that we have reason to believe might work (like forest management to increase carbon uptake and a carbon...
...living wage,” the benefits of unlimited dining, and being, alas, attached to the global economy, greater dining variety is off the menu. And instead of trading insults over open-lists, we’d probably do better to dispatch some keen IOP-niks to lobby against ethanol subsidies in Washington...