There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize production of ethanol in the U.S. Now there’s one more. A swiss study, summarized and analyzed in the journal Science by the Smithsonian’s William Laurance, finds that ethanol production is frequently more environmentally damaging than the use of fossil fuels. According to Laurance’s piece (subscription only):
The arguments that support one biofuel crop over another can easily change when one considers their full environmental effects. A key factor affecting biofuel efficacy is whether native ecosystems are destroyed to produce the biofuels. For example, regardless of how effective sugarcane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the sugarcane fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases… Another environmental cost that varies among biofuels is trace-gas emissions. For example, crops that require nitrogen fertilizers, such as corn or rapeseed, can be a significant source of nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas that also destroys stratospheric ozone… Not all biofuels are beneficial when their full environmental impacts are assessed; some of the most important, such as those produced from corn, sugarcane, and soy, perform poorly in many contexts. There is a clear need to consider more than just energy and greenhouse-gas emissions when evaluating different biofuels and to pursue new biofuel crops and technologies. Governments should be far more selective about which biofuel crops they support through subsidies and tax benefits. For example, multibillion-dollar subsidies for U.S. corn production appear to be a perverse incentive from a rational cost-benefit perspective.
This isn’t an argument against all ethanol. Laurance reports that the best biofuels include ethanol produced from grass or wood. Science expands on the benefits of switchgrass in another recent piece here. But as far as corn/soy ethanol goes, it would be cheaper and more environmentally responsible to open ANWR to new drilling. There’s more on Laurance’s findings at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute here, as well as at Wired.
