Ethanol - Get It Off the Corn Diet

More evidence indicating that corn-based ethanol isn't the key to solving global warming.

Not only does it take a lot of energy to produce it in the first place, and cause fertilizer runoff that leads to state-sized algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, but now University of Minnesota researchers have found (in a Feb. 7 article published in Science) that it actually contributes to global warming.

That's right. When farmers around the world cut down trees or clear grass- and peat-lands to plant corn for ethanol (or soybeans for biodiesel), it creates more carbon dioxide than is saved by the decreased emissions from the biofuels.

And before you think this is a South American or Malaysian problem ("they shouldn't cut down their rain forests, tsk tsk") remember that American farmers are increasingly plowing under land that they had set aside for conservation to take advantage of the increased prices on corn. According to today's Star Tribune, "The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, about 750,000 acres of conservation grasslands were converted to crops last year..." A second study at Iowa State University (also published in Science) found that corn-based ethanol could double greenhouse gas emissions in the next three decades.

Makes you wonder what the Freakonomics guy would say about all this.