March 1, 2010

Corn Ethanol: Still a Boondoggle

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Corn-based ethanol is supposedly a green alternative to gasoline. The corn farming lobby certainly thinks so, anyway, and they’ve persuaded Congress to mandate (and subsidize) increased corn ethanol production through the year 2015.

But is corn ethanol really greener than gasoline? If you analyze total lifecycle emissions directly (i.e., including the CO2 emissions involved not just in burning ethanol, but also in producing it), the answer is yes, though not by much. But there’s more to it than just production. When you switch forest or pasture land to cropland in order to grow more corn, that releases CO2 as well, and you have to take that into account whether the farm lobby likes it or not. (And they don’t.) The chart on the right shows the effects. So what’s the conclusion? A new paper in BioScience1 takes a fresh look at what the market response is to increased corn production, including (a) reduction in food consumption due to higher food prices, (b) intensification of agricultural production, (c) land use change into cropping in the US, and (d) land conversion in the rest of the world. The paper suggests that previous estimates of induced land use changes (ILUC) have been too high, but:

Using straight line amortization over 30 years of production at current fuel yields [] results in ILUC emissions of 27 g CO2 per MJ….[A]dding our lower estimate of emissions to the direct emissions from typical US maize ethanol production (about 65 g CO2e per MJ) would nearly eliminate carbon benefit of this biofuel relative to typical gasoline (94-96 g per MJ).

(Note: MJ = megajoule, a unit of energy.) In other words, even giving corn ethanol the maximum benefit of the doubt, it’s still no greener than gasoline: it releases about 92 grams of CO2 per megajoule of energy compared to 94-96 for gasoline. What’s more, if you assume a more reasonable 20-year amortization period, corn ethanol’s greenhouse gas emissions are even higher. And if you don’t assume that people eat less thanks to increased corn ethanol production, but instead just spend more on food, it goes up even more.

Bottom line: corn ethanol is no greener than gasoline. In fact, it’s almost certainly less green, and at the very least, there’s no urgent need for the U.S. government to pay billions of dollars to subsidize its production. Too bad Iowa is the first state on the primary calendar every four years, isn’t it?

1No link yet. I’ll add one if and when it’s available. UPDATE: It’s not online yet, but the reference is BioScience, March 2010 / Vol. 60 No. 3.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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