Jeff Goodell (see Grist interview) is apparently incapable of writing anything I don’t love. The latest is a piece in Rolling Stone called "Ethanol Scam."
It’s downright shrill! Here’s what Goodell has to say about the ethanol hype:
This is not just hype — it’s dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.
(And yes, he addresses cellulosic.)
As Robert Rapier points out, this quote from Dave Juday — about the Senate’s recently passed 36 billion gallon ethanol mandate — is hilarious:
“It’s like trying to solve a traffic problem by mandating hovercraft. Except we don’t have hovercraft.”
This one’s a must read.
