Tumbledown gulped with great pride and appreciation as the Indianapolis Star devoted a whole section (OK, it wasn't section A,B,C,D,E, or even F; it was section "G"...for green; Thursday, August 17, 2006) to farming. Hey, there was even a red barn on a cover page that was otherwise the color of growing corn (but some of that green was from weeds, despite the chemical and mechanical perfection of the picture. I guess no one on that farm has heard of an invention called the cultivator...or the hoe, for that matter. (And, of course, there isn't an animal in sight.)
But I digress. The Friday (August 18) edition of the Star included an editorial entitled "Pumped up about ethanol" in which the Star took the position that "ethanol could be one soure of helping nation reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil." The editor did at least start with the caveat that "much work remains"...fantasy about what "could be" is not yet passing entirely as reality. What about the arguments attributed to Senator Richard Lugar and Purdue University President Martin Jischke? Let's take them in turn:
1) It is in our national interest to reduce dependence on imported oil. Let's see, last time I checked, most of the corn grown in Indiana was planted in fields prepared by tractors burning oil, in planters burning oil, dressed with chemical fertilizers and oil-based herbicides and pesticides, and, of course, harvested with huge machines chugging oil. The manufacture of all of the machinery and the storage facilities requires the use of oil...and that's all before we get to the production of the ethanol from the corn. Can the Star be so confident that ethanol production actually reduces dependence on foreign oil when a comprehensive accounting is done of the way the corn is produced and shipped for ethanol? Perhaps if our current corn "surplus" had been produced by horse-drawn plows, using manure as the primary fertilizer, then we could talk about a real reduction of dependence on foreign oil. But without the consumption of all that foreign oil, we wouldn't have the surplus to turn into E85.
2) The Star's list of "solutions" to the crisis of dependence on foreign oil is laudable in the main, especially the call to conservation and mass transit (in Indianapolis?), but the exaltation of E85 to an "important" answer to the nation's energy needs is a bit much. Bravado, really.
3) The recognition that something other than corn (e.g., the President's infamous "switchgrass") might be made into ethanol is comforting, especially given corn's drain on the soil (requiring more pesticides and herbicides to grow, and still more loss of soil fertility than with other crops)...and the temptation for farmers to "squeeze as much corn production as agronomics will allow" from every acre. (Tom Holloway Jr., as quoted by Jeff Swiatek in his Thursday article, "Fuel of the Future?") If Swiatek's reporting is correct, Holloway intends to abandon even the modicum of a two-year rotation (classic corn/soybean) for "continuous corn year after year." That's what Tumbledown means by a partial accounting of the cost of Ethanol. A full accounting would include acres of land ruined by such monocrop greed. ...not to mention the genetic modification of all those non-corn candidates for ethanol production, some of which are naturally occuring grasses that will not easily be confined to the plots where they are grown.Tumbledown was not entirely negative about the reporting (cheerleading). Vasanth Sridharan's report, "Environmental Benefit: It's open to discussion," was both "fair and balanced" (to borrow a trademark).
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