Evansville Courier & Press
With proposals for ethanol plants popping up throughout the Tri-State, it likely came as good news late Thursday that the Senate had passed a national energy bill with a strong endorsement for biofuel production.
It was certainly good news for corn growers, construction workers who would build the plants and for those who would be hired into the relatively small number of jobs the plants would create.
But for others - livestock and chicken farmers, grocery shoppers, those concerned about air quality and those of us who worry about the high price of gasoline - it's not so clear that this is good news.
That last one may be a surprise to some, given that congressional efforts to promote ethanol use are in part a feel-good political gesture to do something about our dependence on foreign oil. But there were several wire reports this past week saying that because Congress is attempting to force increased production of ethanol, oil companies may reconsider increasing refinery capacity. Of course, tight refining capacity is one of the culprits in today's high prices. Even so, wouldn't a decreased supply of gasoline be offset by the increased supply of ethanol? Probably not.
The energy bill, reminiscent of the Carter administration's meddling in the energy markets, has the wildly ambitious goal of boosting today's modest production of ethanol to 36 billion gallons by 2022.
Even if that goal is attained, it would displace only a fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption, which today is 134 billion gallons a year.
The rush to embrace ethanol by the Bush administration and by Congress is already hitting consumers indirectly in the form of higher food prices, particularly for beef, chicken and cereals.
The rate of inflation is running around 5.5 percent - more than double last year's - driven by high energy costs but also by demand for corn-based ethanol.
The price of corn, which is already one of our most heavily subsidized crops, has doubled, and farmers have planted the largest crop since World War II.
There are other concerns as well, such as too few gas stations selling ethanol-based fuel, and the fact that while ethanol burns cleaner, critics say it uses up more fossil fuel energy in its production than it actually creates.
Others claim that the ozone produced from burning ethanol can be more harmful than that produced by gasoline to the health of people with asthma and other respiratory ailments.
That's a lot to worry about, especially in Tri-State counties concerned that new Environmental Protection Agency clean-air standards for ozone will put them back in trouble with the federal government next year.
Indeed, with these and other concerns, it looks as if Congress may have given ethanol an exemption from the laws of economics, but not from the law of unintended consequences.
Clearly, the whole ethanol eruption deserves some good old-fashioned skeptical scrutiny.
Unfortunately, it may be too late to slow the ethanol bandwagon, especially one driven hard by both Congress and the president.