Max Gladwell

Ethanol is an easy scapegoat, especially when troubled times call for one, but it’s not the villain most make it out to be.

When a news source like Business Week articulates your position so accurately, there’s not much more to add. Corn ethanol is a bridge. The government subsidies and mandates are necessary to build it, so that when next-generation cellulosic ethanol comes online, we’ll have markets, policies, and infrastructure in place to do some serious damage to our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Corn ethanol’s role in the food crisis is negligible, and there are upsides to higher commodity prices, especially for farmers in developing nations, but we need a low-carbon fuel standard in order to spur innovation and level the playing field for alternative fuels.

“There are bad biofuels and good biofuels,” says Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis. Corn-based ethanol ranks as mediocre. Yet it is only a minor cause of high food prices, and better biofuels are on the horizon. The transition to these superior fuels will get a boost from policies now being developed, with California leading the way.

The one point the article does not make is that we should be importing sugar cane ethanol from Brazil with no tariffs.

Brazilian sugarcane is more efficient. It doesn’t grow in the Amazon region, so it doesn’t cause rainforest destruction, and it can be turned into other, more valuable fuels. On Apr. 23, Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, Calif., announced plans, with Brazilian partners, to make biodiesel, jet fuel, and bio-gasoline from sugarcane.

Finally:

Blame energy costs, not ethanol, for your grocery bill: Has ethanol contributed to the surge in food prices? Not very much, concludes a group of agricultural economists at Texas A&M University in an Apr. 10 report from the school’s Agricultural & Food Policy Center. “The underlying force driving changes in the agricultural industry, along with the economy as a whole, is overall higher energy costs,” the researchers conclude, not biofuels. In addition, reducing the amount of ethanol the government requires each year “does not result in significantly lower corn prices,” they say. That’s because the ethanol industry is here to stay, since it is now being driven largely by market forces rather than by the government’s renewable-fuel mandate.