Martin Wolf kicks off the economics debate on biofuels (fossil fuels are, what, long-dead bio-fuels?), linking this study.
LA Times continues its series with this take-down of the false hope for Corn-in-America:
Then there are the environmental effects. Corn is a very water- and chemical-intensive crop. Ordinarily, farmers rotate crops annually to avoid soil exhaustion, but high corn prices encourage them to plant corn in the same fields year after year. The only way to make this work is to pour on more fertilizers, which seep into waterways and create algae blooms that suck up all the oxygen and kill everything else. Two "dead zones" caused by chemical fertilizers in the Gulf of Mexico are already the size of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Meanwhile, herbicides used in cornfields seep into groundwater supplies and raise risks of cancer and birth defects.
Further, there's only so much farmland to go around. To meet the Senate's 2022 renewable-fuels mandate of 36 billion gallons using corn would take 96 million acres. Last year, the entire corn crop, most of which went to food, was grown on 80 million acres. The only source of unused farmland is 37 million acres in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, under which the government rents cropland from farmers for wetlands and wildlife conservation. Farming this land would destroy critically endangered Midwest wetlands and savannas and contribute to soil erosion, contaminated water and deadly algae blooms.
Further, there's only so much farmland to go around. To meet the Senate's 2022 renewable-fuels mandate of 36 billion gallons using corn would take 96 million acres. Last year, the entire corn crop, most of which went to food, was grown on 80 million acres. The only source of unused farmland is 37 million acres in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, under which the government rents cropland from farmers for wetlands and wildlife conservation. Farming this land would destroy critically endangered Midwest wetlands and savannas and contribute to soil erosion, contaminated water and deadly algae blooms.
