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Rahall Calls Growth in Ethanol Production 'a Serious Misstep'

Posted on: Thursday, 29 May 2008, 00:00 CDT

Rep. Nick J. Rahall spoke out Friday against the increasing role of ethanol to meet America's energy needs.

Rahall, D-W.Va., said using corn, soybeans and other crops to make ethanol is a "faulty energy policy" that contributes to world hunger and sparks international unrest.

"The rush into ethanol has been a serious misstep. We had better look carefully before we leap again," Rahall told the City Club of Cleveland on Friday afternoon.

"Countries around the world are in dangerous states of unrest. Over the course of this year, riots have erupted in such places as Haiti, Yemen, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico and Morocco.

"Much of this unrest can be directly linked to food shortages," Rahall said. "These food shortages can be largely linked, as the United Nations has stated, to the huge increase in the production of food-based biofuels.

"And by the way," Rahall said, "gas prices are not going down as a result."

Rahall, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said he hopes our government leaders work to develop a "comprehensive energy plan that boosts efficiency" and includes a wide variety of fuel alternatives, including efforts to convert coal to liquids.

"The solution to America's dependence on foreign oil," Rahall said, will not "come from swapping one addiction for another. Nor will it come about by dumping those mainstay fuels that comprise the greatest part of our energy portfolio."

President Bush backed increased ethanol production in his 2002 State of the Union speech, recommending the U.S. increase "alternative fuel" production to 35 billion gallons by 2017, an increase of more than 700 percent.

Corn-based ethanol production rose from 2.1 billion to 4.8 billion gallons between 2002 and 2006.

Taxpayers are helping to subsidize the ethanol industry. In 2005, the federal government provided $8.9 billion in farm subsidies for corn in 2005 alone.

"I am reminded of a number of old adages," Rahall joked. "For every complex problem, there is a simple solution - and it is usually wrong. If something is too good to be true - it probably is."

Rahall also was a major critic of "synfuel" tax credits, which expired at the end of 2007.

A handful of electric-power companies - including Progress Energy, DTE Energy Co. and TECO Energy - used the 1980 Crude Oil Windfall Profits Act to claim billions of dollars in federal tax credits between 1990 and 2007 for making "synfuels" that were nothing more than already-marketable coal sprayed with diesel fuel or pine tars.

The 1980 act was designed to encourage domestic energy independence in the wake of the Arab oil embargo of the mid-1970s.

Today, advocates promote biofuels as one way to achieve energy independence from OPEC and foreign oil imports.

Many other countries are using other food crops - like sugar cane, sugar beets and palm oil - to make alternative fuels.

"Precious farmlands and foods that were previously used for human consumption are now being used for fuel production," Rahall said.

Food prices are jumping in the U.S. During nine months in 2006 and 2007, domestic corn prices rose by 61 percent.

The price of rice - a staple in many countries - rose by 77 percent last year and another 140 percent since Jan. 1. Prices for corn, wheat and soybeans are at a 10-year high.

Yet recent studies show food-based ethanol does little or nothing to improve the earth's environment.

Rahall cited two recent studies:

* Princeton University scientists concluded corn-based ethanol will generate twice the greenhouse gas emissions as conventional gasoline would generate over the next 30 years.

* A University of Minnesota/Nature Conservancy study warned that destroying rain forests, grasslands and savannahs in Southeast Asia and South America for biofuel crops destroy trees and other vegetation that have always absorbed greenhouse gas emissions.

But the ethanol craze has created a few winners, Rahall pointed out, including pigs.

"The cost of corn has grown so high that numbers of farmers are fattening their swine with chocolate. I tell you, something is terribly wrong with a policy that leads to pigs eating better than people."

Past City Club of Cleveland speakers have included: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney, Henry Louis Gates, Madeleine Albright, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sandra Day O'Connor and Douglas MacArthur.

To contact staff writer Paul J. Nyden, use e-mail or call 348- 5164.

(c) 2008 Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Source: Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V.

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