Industry Waging Defense of Biofuels
WASHINGTON _ Already this year, ethanol has been blamed for more expensive Easter eggs, dying shrimp along the Louisiana coastline and costlier milk in school lunches.
Germans curse biofuels for higher beer costs. In Italy, consumer advocates organized a pasta boycott last week, complaining that pasta prices have soared because farmers grow crops for fuel, not food.
Minnesota bloggers even blamed the I-35 bridge collapse on ethanol, arguing that government money should have gone to bridge repair rather than ethanol subsidies.
Now, with huge new benefits for ethanol pending in Congress, the industry and its allies are waging an offensive against detractors. A group in Miami intends to go so far as to train and dispatch “certified biofuels educators” across the country.
“The biofuels picture isn’t perfect. There are certainly flaws in it, and the nation seems to be focusing on those flaws right now,” said Rick Tolman, CEO of the National Corn Growers Association, which has its headquarters in St. Louis.
The twin messages that Tolman wants to convey in new videos and updated studies is that a grocery trip costs more now primarily because of higher energy prices and that farmers are doing a better job with chemicals and fertilizers.
Similarly, an alliance calling itself the Clean Fuels Development Coalition last week distributed a new Ethanol Fact Book arguing that “we can have both food and fuel, and more of both, thanks to ethanol production.”
“For years we were criticized for having cheap corn that was encouraging obesity,” Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union, said at a news conference. “And then this last year when corn got to $4 (per bushel), it switched to `you’re causing people to starve around the world.’”
The agribusiness interests see spreading these messages as vital with Congress about to decide whether to give fast-growing biofuels a new supercharger by requiring that the nation use 36 billion gallons yearly by 2022 _ 15 billion gallons from corn. That is six times what is used today. Next in the schedule: the Senate and House appoint members to decide whether the Senate-passed, 36 billion-gallon mandate survives.
Critics want the ear of Congress, too.
In a report last week called Trouble Downstream, the Washington-based Environmental Working Group and its allies mined government records to find that nearly 2 billion tons of soil gets eroded each year _ and with it nitrate pollution choking rivers and streams on the way to creating a vast swath of “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
The problem will only worsen with more corn planted for ethanol, the report contended, and therefore Washington needs to enforce existing rules requiring conservation in return for crop subsidies.
This weekend in Washington, dozens of experts from 16 countries planned a strategy session and “teach-in” a la the 1960s carrying a message that agro-fuels is a dangerous diversion from the fight against global warming.
One participant, University of California engineering professor Tadeusz Patzek, argued Friday that energy savings from ethanol won’t be sufficient to prepare for dramatic oil and carbon reductions forced on the United States in coming years.
Replied the Corn Growers’ Tolman: “People are feeling threatened and pushing back hard. But biofuels still meets the test of getting us part ways to our goals.”
Meanwhile, a non-profit group called the American Biofuels Council intends to organize for the information war in a big way _ with so-called certified biofuels educators that train for brief periods in Miami after courses at home.
Council founder and executive director Sean O’Hanlon, who announced the program last week, said his group intends to have 500 people trained and certified within a year for meetings with schools, city councils, legislatures and any group wanting to learn about renewable fuels.
He acknowledged that there will be an as-yet unspecified training fee for materials and that no university or government agency has provided accreditation.
“There’s a jihad going on against ethanol right now,” O’Hanlon said. “I looked around and saw that nobody was doing this.”
___
(c) 2007, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Visit the Post-Dispatch on the World Wide Web at http://www.stltoday.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.