Ethanol and Other Follies

            Every time I stop at a gas station to fill up, I am reminded that good intentions come to naught when they clash with common sense. 

            Before I pull the nozzle I'm told that the fuel I'm about to pump contains 10% ethanol.   What a wonderful idea!  By replacing gasoline, ethanol reduces our dependence on foreign oil.  And, of course, burning less fossil fuels means less pollution.  Who could argue with that?
            Well, it so happens that this argument clashes with common sense reality, because it ignores the negative effects of ethanol.  First of all, the production of ethanol requires an increase in corn harvests, meaning that more land (5 million more acres so far) must be converted to this crop.  And where does this land come from?  From grasslands, from filled-in wetlands, and conservation lands.  And what else is needed?  Fertilizer.  Lots of it.  We're talking billions of pounds of nitrates that can filter into our streams, our rivers, and our aquifers. 
            But nitrates are not the only polluters occasioned by the thirst for ethanol.  You can't just put corn juice in your tank.  It has to be converted to a flammable liquid, just like oil needs to be refined into gasoline.  Where is that done?  In factories burning coal and polluting the air.
            What else?  It costs more to produce a gallon of ethanol than a gallon of gasoline.  And devoting so much land to growing corn for ethanol raises the price of all other corn products.
            Ethanol is not the only idea that our well-intentioned energy gurus have come up with that clashes with reality.  How about wind farms?  Is the little energy produced by wind turbines, whose tips can rotate up to 170 miles per hour, worth the lives of thousands of eagles and migrating birds?  How about insect-eating bats?  The Journal of BioScience estimates that in 2012 between 600,000 and 900,000 bats were killed by wind turbines.  Consider that one bat can consume between 600 and 1,000 mosquitoes and other insects in just one hour.  Could it be that flying insects, not humans, are the biggest beneficiaries of wind turbines?
            The United States government is moving full speed ahead to subsidize other renewable energy sources (biomass, thermal, hydro, etc.), but has not always been wise in choosing winners and losers.  The list of losers like Solyndra ($535 million lost), Spectrawatt ($500 million), First Solar ($1.46 billion), Sun Power ($1.2 billion), Fisker Automotive ($529 million), Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700 million), Brightsource ($1.6 billion), and many others have proven again and again that investment in renewable energy is no slam dunk. 
            Some $80 billion of taxpayer money has been flushed down the renewable energy drain since Obama took office in 2009.  This is not to say that renewable energy has no future.  It does.  But it would be wise, I think, to consider the pros and cons of any project before pouring money into it.  The market, which uses its own money, is much better at that sort of thing than the government, which uses ours.  I doubt very much that the market would have picked $80 billion worth of losers or raped the land to produce more corn.