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Why Ethanol Is Not An Ecologically Appropriate Alternative Fuel

Yes the ethanol boom is about to bust, or if it isn't, it should be. There are three main reasons for this.

1. Ethanol production involves diverting land from food production to energy production in a world where millions go to bed hungry every day. This means that the more land is diverted from producing food to producing energy, the less land is available for food production.

The problem is that there is only a limited amount of arable land, and what there is is slowly disappearing. There are various reasons for this, including: salinization (soils becoming too salty to be productive), soil erosion or desertification, and urban sprawl (building or paving over productive lands).

Thus, as world populations increase, diverting limited available lands from food production to energy production is not a long-term strategy consistent with feeding the world, and can certainly never replace petroleum. It also increases the price of food, making it less affordable to the world's poor.

2. Ethanol production is actually subsidized by petroleum inputs in several ways. First, much of the electricity which will be used to produce ethanol in the new production facilities being built in the United States, in particular, will be provided by coal-burning power plants. Thus any saving in greenhouse emissions from burning "cleaner" ethanol will be more than offset by the coal used in it's production.

Second, farm machinery used to plant and harvest corn (from which ethanol is primarily made) almost universally runs on diesel, which is also derived from petroleum. Many agricultural inputs, including artificial fertilizers and pesticides, are also derived from petroleum.

Thus ethanol production is actually indirectly converting oil and coal to ethanol by way of corn, which is far from an efficient way of producing renewable energy. In fact, ecological anthropologists pointed out decades ago that contemporary industrial agriculture actually /uses/ more energy in the form of petroleum inputs than it /produces/ in terms of usable food calories (Harris 1977:284). Add to that the energy that is used in transportation and manufacturing in the production of ethanol, and I find it hard to imagine that ethanol production could be considered sustainable without petroleum subsidies.

3. Ethanol, while based on the use of renewable, living things, is not emission free. True, ethanol is a cleaner burning fuel than petroleum, but it still

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