The twisted logic of biofuel advocates has been that we starve the world today by turning our food into fuel right now, but in a few years the world can eat again because we will soon make biofuels out of inedible cellulose from switchgrass, wood chips and crop waste, instead of edible corn, soybeans and rapeseed.
Unfortunately, three agricultural economists from Iowa State University with insider information on new ethanol technology have published a paper that says cellulosic ethanol will likely never be economically viable. This comes on top of the recent Princeton University study published in the journal Science, which concludes that all current and proposed future biofuels are far worse for the environment and for global warming than using ordinary gasoline.
In Eugene our city government has been promoting the biofuel hoax by using “biodiesel” fuel in our city buses with the fraudulent claim that they were paying more for expensive biofuel in order to fight global warming, which is an insupportable claim. A SeQuential Biofuel spokesman recently published an opinion piece in the Register-Guard trying to distance his company from the use of canola oil made from Oregon-grown rapeseed, by saying that, “A small but growing percentage of the SQPB facility uses Oregon-grown canola oil.” Now that is a remarkable statement given that Oregonians were subjected to countless airings of Oregon Lottery-SeQuential biofuel television advertisements, bragging about their use of Oregon-produced canola oil in their fuel. As turning food into fuel becomes less morally defensible every day, the biofuel makers are trying to hide the true facts of their costly product: Biodiesel made from canola oil costs the same to make as regular diesel made from oil.
The bottom line of all this is that we consumers have been lied to, manipulated and made to suffer record high food prices so biofuel makers can make a profit out of turning our food into fuel at a time when the world has several billion people feeling the pangs of hunger every day. Oil price increases have not shrunk the human food supply, but biofuel production has! The more biofuels we produce, the less food we have to eat, because we grow biofuel crops, even switchgrass, using the same land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment and labor we use to grow food. The world is running out of wheat because too many wheat farmers have switched to growing corn for ethanol production. The United States Department of Agriculture has stated that by May 31, 2008, U.S. wheat supplies will be lower than at any time since 1948, when the United States population was less than 147 million. The security of the world food supply is an issue worth fighting for.
Christopher Calder is a student at the University