By Gerald Winegrad   

I have been exposed to the good, the bad, and the ugly both in people and policy during a half-century of environmental advocacy. One of the really ugly scams is the corn ethanol federal mandate. It forces Americans to use 15 billion gallons of ethanol in their gasoline that has been grown and then distilled from corn. Whether in your car, truck, boat, or lawnmower, Congress has dictated by law since 2006 that ethanol be blended into your gas so that 98% of gasoline now contains corn ethanol, most commonly a 10% blend called E10, but it can be as high as 15%.

This subsidized boondoggle results in more than 5.1 billion bushels of U.S. corn converted to ethanol from 30 million acres of heavily fertilized land, nearly five times the land mass of Maryland. Ethanol now consumes 34% of all corn produced, with 1.24 billion gallons exported.

The federal renewable fuels standard dictated ethanol usage of four billion gallons in 2006. Then, the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007 ramped up renewable fuel requirements. Both laws began providing enormous payments to the corn ethanol industry, now exceeding $50 billion. These included grants to build ethanol plants to process the raw corn into ethanol. Most of the approximately 200 plants are concentrated in the Midwest near where the corn is grown. Most ethanol is then shipped long distances.

The mandates and subsidies were enacted with the hopes that turning corn and other materials into fuel would expand the nation’s renewable fuels sector, help the environment, and reduce reliance on imported oil. These proved to be false expectations. Skeptics concluded that this was a huge con to further enrich giant agricultural corporations and assist farmers by boosting the demand and price for corn.

Congress approved a subsidy of 45 cents per gallon and imposed a tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents a gallon to protect U.S. agribusiness from cheaper imports produced from farm waste. The $6 billion-a-year subsidy and the tariffs were repealed in 2012 as the ethanol industry boomed and many analysts and lawmakers realized the original legislative goals were not being met.

The front pages of Forbes, National Geographic, and many other publications castigated the ethanol windfall, noting the negative environmental effects. In March 2008, Time magazine featured a story titled “The Clean Energy Scam,” concluding that, “Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous.” The New York Times headlined a story in June 2011 “The Great Corn Con.”

A new exhaustive five-year study released in February again supports these conclusions. Published in the prestigious peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, nine researchers document that corn ethanol adds 24% more global warming emissions than using gasoline. Tyler Lark, the lead author, noted “Corn ethanol is not a climate-friendly fuel.” This is because of the huge release of carbon on land to grow the corn as well as the use of fossil fuels to grow, harvest, and produce ethanol from corn. The report found that the ethanol mandate “has failed to meet the policy’s own greenhouse gas emissions targets and negatively affected water quality, the area of land used for conservation, and other ecosystem processes.”

The research notes that corn prices increased by 30% and the prices of other crops by 20%. This was driven by the fact that from 2008 to 2016, U.S. corn ethanol increased by 46% and its cultivation expanded by nearly 7 million acres and other cropland by 5 million acres. Annual nationwide fertilizer use attributed to corn ethanol rose by as much as 8% and water quality degradants increasing by up to 5%. Corn is an extremely nitrogen intensive and leaky crop that, at best, absorbs 60% of the nitrogen that takes fossil fuels to produce. Phosphorus is required, too.

These nutrients are the primary pollution sources degrading our Chesapeake Bay, while the Mississippi watershed and Gulf of Mexico are directly impacted by Midwestern agriculture. Corn tillage also causes erosion smothering habitat for oysters and other bay life. Rising corn prices also stimulated conversion of Chesapeake Bay watershed lands to corn, impeding bay restoration.

A National Wildlife Federation spokesperson summarized the research: “Corn ethanol has only accelerated the climate crisis, contaminated drinking water throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and destroyed millions of acres of wildlife habitat.”

Vast quantities of water are used in creating ethanol and smog-producing chemicals are released.

Diverting corn from food to fuel our vehicles raises ethical concerns. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, shuttering its vast grain exports, the United Nations warned that the world faced “unprecedented catastrophic levels” of food insecurity. Corn ethanol helped push global food prices to all-time highs as people face the worst food crisis since 2008. Corn is critical to global food supplies.

When President Bush implemented the renewable fuels standard in 2005, the price of corn was $2.10 a bushel; it is now at about $8.13, nearly a record high. The amount of corn it takes to fill an SUV with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Ethanol contains about one-third less energy than gasoline, so vehicles get lower gas mileage. The U.S. and Europe could immediately replace the lost grain exports from Ukraine’s breadbasket by cutting their biofuel production in half.

In 2007, Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Food rapporteur, called the conversion of arable land to grow food crops for biofuels “a crime against humanity” and urged a moratorium to halt the “catastrophe.” Other humanitarians also have voiced such grave ethical problems with corn prices driving poorer people to starvation.
Ethanol is the most common form of alcohol and can be readily converted. The original renewable fuels standard laws were to foster the usage of other renewable fuels including cellulosic ethanol from such waste products as leaves and stalks of corn plants, corn cobs, wheat straw, sugarcane waste, and wood waste from forestry and paper mills. Reclaimed vegetable oil biodiesel also was encouraged. Instead, agribusiness seized federal subsidies to produce ethanol from corn, which is responsible for 87% of all ethanol produced in the U.S., leaving out most advanced and environmentally sound alternative fuels.

Corn ethanol has not contributed to our energy independence as its life cycle is likely a wash or worse in negative energy savings. Largely due to fracking, the U.S. is now the largest producer of both oil and natural gas. We export increasing amounts of both as production ramps up, and now our net exports exceed imports.
The recent landmark, peer-reviewed research underscores that corn ethanol adds to climate change and causes other substantial problems. It’s well past time to repeal this boondoggle. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced the pending Corn Ethanol Mandate Elimination Act.

Good luck with passage as presidential candidates for 50 years have prostrated themselves in Iowa on the altar of corn ethanol. Iowa leads the nation in corn growing with 57% grown to produce 27% of all U.S. ethanol. Last month, a misguided President Biden visited Iowa to announce a 50% increase in ethanol concentration for the summer months to 15% ethanol. This led to a Washington Post editorial opining how “Biden Gives in to the Ethanol Scam.” The rip-off continues.

Gerald Winegrad represented the greater Annapolis area in the General Assembly for 16 years. Contact him at gwwabc@comcast.net.