To borrow a phrase from another debate (where it is misused), the science is settled.
 
So is the economics.
 
As Peter Suderman points out, the federal Environmental Protection Agency proposes reducing from 18.5 billion to 15.2 billion gallons the amount of renewable fuel (essentially, ethanol, almost all from corn) it requires refiners to mix into total U.S. gasoline production each year. Well, the longest journey begins with a single step.
 
But this journey could be completed in one fell swoop.
 
EPA should eliminate the requirement completely. And if EPA won’t do it, Congress should.
 
Why?
 
Because producing ethanol is bad for the environment, bad for cars and drivers, and, worst of all, bad for the hungry around the world.
 Bad for the environment: Producing all kinds of pollution in growing, harvesting, transporting, and refining the crops from which it’s made (mostly corn), converting millions of acres from other uses to fuel production, and even—contrary to the hopes of its advocates—putting more, not less, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per mile of travel energized than petroleum.

• Bad for cars and drivers: It corrodes fuel lines and injectors, necessitating costly repairs, and it costs more per mile than gasoline.
• Bad for the hungry poor around the world: As Suderman summarizes, “A 25-gallon tank full of pure ethanol requires about 450 pounds of corn—roughly the amount of calories required to feed someone for a year. Some 40 percent of U.S. corn crops go to ethanol production, which in effect means we’re burning food for automobile fuel rather than eating it. Studies by economists at the World Bank have found that a one percent increase in world food prices correlates with a half-percent decrease in calorie consumption amongst the world’s poor. When world food prices spiked between 2007 and 2008, between 20 and 40 percent of the effect was attributable to increased global reliance on biofuels. The effect on world hunger is simply devastating.”

 
Just how harmful has American biofuels policy been to the world’s poor? It has caused about 192,000 more premature deaths each year than would otherwise occur.
 
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Featured Photo Credit: Andreas Krappweis