Conservation

Recent topics of focus:

My report on the January 15th membership meeting in the March/April 2008 newsletter could neither capture the full richness of the reports by Anne Tazewell and Kim Tungate nor provide much context. Furthermore, since the publication of the newsletter, several people have responded to the report. So I’ll add a few comments here.

Corn for food versus corn for fuel: While it’s true that ethanol processing leaves distillers grain that is usable for animal feed, automotive engineer Dave Erb pointed out that there is substantial loss--2/3 of corn’s biomass. There’s no free lunch for humans or cows.

The rise in corn prices because of demand for ethanol: It may be bad for low-income Mexicans, but Anne Tazewell’s presentation pointed out that it’s good for farmers (including the third-world farmers who find it difficult to compete with subsidized American corn) and good for the environment. “A primary threat to agriculture today is losing farmland to development interests. One of the reasons for this is that crop prices have been too low and development pressures too high for farmers to stay in agriculture.” Thus do suburbs bury farmland.

However, an article in the February 29 issue of Science magazine (see abstract) warns of another danger—converting marginal and inappropriate land such as rainforest, peatland, savannas, or grassland into farms for ethanol crops, which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than could be balanced by the use of the biofuels.

One source of pressure to change land use policy is the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. On the one hand, the act addresses the nation’s dependence on foreign oil (see the National Defense Council Foundation's “The Hidden Cost of Oil: An Update” (PDF)). On the other hand, it might increase the likelihood that farmers will take vulnerable land out of the Conservation Reserve Program in order to grow more lucrative fuel crops that expose the land to erosion, deprive it of protective cover, reduce riparian buffers that protect water sources, and decrease wildlife habitat (“Ethanol production threatens soil, water,” TheStarPress.com, 2/7/08).

The Science article recommends making biofuels from waste biomass or biomass grown on already degraded farmland. This advice accords with Tazewell and Tungate’s prediction that corn will not remain ethanol’s primary source. Although it is currently the only source that can produce ethanol on an industrial scale, research is diversifying sources and the processes used to release the sugars needed for fuel. One of the sources they highlighted in January, algae, was also featured in an October 2007 National Geographic article on biofuels, which showed how it might be harnessed to capture CO2 emitted from coal plants.

Other paths to a sustainable transportation future: As Dave Erb said in a post to the state-wide Conservation listserv, there are other ways to reduce our dependence on oil, including building vehicles with better mileage and vehicles that use electricity generated by renewable sources. Someday we may not be fitting nozzles that spew liquids into gas tanks at all. And perhaps we’ll drive less if the centrifugal forces that send populations scurrying out of cities reverse themselves. In Cleveland, the subprime mortgage crisis has left many empty houses in poor inner-city neighborhoods. In one program called CitiRama, developers buy the abandoned houses, re-building them larger and with more amenities—including green features—and sell them to middle class families tired of the commute to the outer suburbs. The result is less driving, decreased fuel demand, and often, a more integrated neighborhood with an increased tax base.

The virtues of vegetarian diets for both humans and their vehicles: A March 5 article in the Independent Weekly reminds us that the energy balance of beef is distorted when we take cattle off farms, confine them in feed lots, feed them on corn grown with fossil fuel based herbicides and fertilizers, and truck the meat all over the country. The chemicals are bad for the soil and water; the corn is bad for the cows, so that they must be constantly treated with antibiotics, which make them produce lethal antibiotic-resistant e. coli. The loss of manure is bad for farms. If you eat locally, you need less petroleum. It’s really the industrial method of producing cattle that’s destructive, not the cattle per se (also see Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals).

This is obviously an important and complicated topic. We plan to go on exploring it. Stay tuned.