Friday, November 15, 2013

Good morning,

Everybody has seen those frightening images of endless lines of cars and trucks, all belching choking exhaust, crawling into some city or other which is inevitably shrouded in a haze of pollution (go to Google images and type in 'highway pollution' if you don't know what I am talking about).

Fear of the consequences of this kind of pollution have contributed to laws that require oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year. And it makes a certain kind of sense. Ethanol is cleaner and it is renewable, since it is mostly made out of corn.

But is the marginal benefit worth the enormous cost?

Please scroll down for some excerpts from a recent story highlighting ethanol's other impact on the environment.

Thanks for reading,

Your Living Green editor

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The ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation - more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined - have vanished.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president's push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.