| 摘要 | Just in time for today’s Earth Day festivities, President Bush has announced a new initiative to combat global warming. He set a goal of stopping the growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025 and reducing emissions thereafter. But rather than plan for 2025—which is another two or three presidencies away—Bush should immediately fix his ethanol policy, which is increasing GHG emissions and raising food prices not only in the United States but all over the world.
American companies are still trying to digest the ethanol mandates passed by Congress last December. Congress mandated the production of 9 billion gallons of ethanol or other renewable fuels this year; that number will gradually increase until it reaches 36 billion gallons in 2022. In addition, ethanol producers receive a tax break of 51 cents a gallon, and corn growers receive huge subsidies that may increase in the next farm bill.
Using ethanol for energy was supposed to be a win-win situation: the United States has so much corn, we were told, that it could use some to make gasoline, thereby reducing its GHG emissions and also reducing its dependence on foreign oil. But in the real world, unintended consequences are all too frequent.
Take the linkage between ethanol and GHG emissions. Scientists now believe that the production of ethanol actually creates more harmful emissions than it prevents. Indeed, Princeton University professor Timothy Searchinger and other researchers have concluded that “corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20 percent savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.” (Their findings were published earlier this year in Science magazine.) The reason is that converting undeveloped land to cropland—in order to grow more corn and facilitate biofuel production—releases a massive amount of carbon dioxide. Only if biofuels are made from waste products or grown on abandoned agricultural lands does the production process actually reduce GHG emissions.
This might suggest that there are ways of producing biofuels that do not lead to increases in greenhouses gases: just produce them out of waste material, without cutting down forests or plowing over fields. Yet Larry Kumins, vice president of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, has shown that the level of U.S. ethanol production in 2007—about 8 billion gallons, or 5 percent of the gasoline pool—is optimal. Producing 9 billion gallons this year will be difficult, and producing 36 billion gallons in 2022 will be impossible with today’s technology.
Here’s why: since ethanol separates from gasoline in the presence of water, the blends of ethanol and gasoline that many of us put in our cars can’t be transported through pipelines. Instead, ethanol is shipped by rail, at greater cost than gasoline, and mixed with gasoline near the point of distribution. That’s why the 10 percent ethanol-gasoline blends are not available all over the country, only in major metropolitan areas.
In addition, ethanol production is contributing to increases in the price of food, both in the United States and abroad. Not only is corn being made into ethanol, but other crops are being abandoned in favor of corn.
Last Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that in the first quarter of 2008 food prices rose at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.1 percent, up from 4.8 percent in 2007 and 2.2 percent in 2006. Department of Agriculture data show that eggs increased by 29.2 percent last year, compared to 4.9 percent in 2006. Oil products are forecast to rise by 7 percent to 8 percent this year.
Rising food prices have been especially hard on developing countries. Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis recently lost his job over food riots, and the government of the Philippines is releasing supplies of food in hopes of preventing similar disturbances. Indonesia has just banned exports of wheat, and global rice prices are hitting new records.
Yet President Bush still believes in ethanol. “We worked with Congress to pass energy legislation that specifies a new fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, and requires fuel producers to supply at least 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022,” he said in his speech last week. “This should provide an incentive for shifting to a new generation of fuels like cellulosic ethanol that will reduce concerns about food prices and the environment.”
The problem is that the new generation of biofuels is not yet commercially viable. When it becomes viable, perhaps with the help of government-funded research, it will undoubtedly succeed without government mandates.
Rather than set a new goal for stabilizing GHG emissions, Congress and President Bush could do one simple thing that would truly honor of Earth Day: eliminate ethanol subsidies and get rid of the mandates.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a weekly columnist for The New York Sun.
Image by Shutterstock/Darren Wamboldt. |
