I have railed on this point before. Today The Night Writer has gathered a few more bits of information pointing out the mass cognitive dissonance or at least gross misunderstanding about the Ethanol industry. Read the Whole thing.

Closer to home, Tom Meersman of the Star Tribune has written a couple of articles recently that pick up on the same information. An excerpt Ethanol: More harm than good (Feb. 7) reports:

But a growing number of scientists are questioning the ecological benefits of biofuels. A policy report last month by the British Royal Society indicated that biofuels have been described as "carbon neutral," meaning that the carbon they emit to the atmosphere when burned is offset by the carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere while growing.

The problem is that those benefits assume the world can turn large amounts of crops into biofuels, the report said, without needing to use more land to make up for lost food production. Clearing tropical forests and growing crops on natural peat lands in Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere "risk releasing enough greenhouse gases to negate any of the intended future climate benefits," the report said.

The reason for scientists' concern, said Tilman, is that soil and plants hold three times more carbon than air. Clearing trees to grow more corn or bulldozing tropical forests to grow more sugarcane emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, either quickly through the burning of the wood, or more gradually through the decomposition of carbon stored in plants and soil.

Tilman calculated that converting natural ecosystems to raise corn or sugarcane for ethanol, or soybeans or palms for biodiesel, will release 17 to 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels. The Minnesota study estimated that in the United States, it will take 93 years for the carbon losses from plowing one acre of healthy grassland to equal the carbon savings from corn-based ethanol produced on that land.

Ethanol industry officials downplay the effects, saying that the process will become more efficient over time and that other organic resources will also be used to take pressure off of fuel crops. I wonder, however, what will replace all the groundwater sucked out of the earth to produce ethanol, as Meersman reported in Is ethanol tapping too much water? (Jan. 28):

With a flood of ethanol plants headed toward Minnesota, there's growing concern about whether there will be enough groundwater to satisfy the booming industry's thirst.

The issue was brought into focus last year in Granite Falls, where an ethanol plant in its first year of operations depleted the groundwater so much that it had to begin pumping water from the Minnesota River.

It takes between four and five gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol at a biofuel plant, and with 17 ethanol plants now operating in the state, six under construction and 10 more proposed or in the planning stages, the threat of more drains on underground water are rising...

The industry is consuming about 2 billion gallons of groundwater per year, according to state estimates.

That amount could quadruple by 2011 if the state's ethanol production more than doubles, as expected.

I wonder how many mud pies that much water could make? Finally, another article in Wired, Can't See the Forest for the Biofuels, makes many of the same points and also notes:

Brazil has designated nearly half a billion acres of forests, grassland and marshes as "degraded" areas suitable for conversion to farming. While the entire Alaska-sized area won't be cleared, much of it could be planted with soybeans, the staple of that country's biofuel efforts.

Half a billion acres? That's 500 million acres in just one country, being sacrificed to "save" the earth. It must be the same scientific reasoning that once said bleeding a patient was a good way to cure him. Meanwhile, 500 million acres is 250,000 times the size of the 2,000 acres (out of 19.5 million) in ANWR considered too precious to allow oil drilling (though those 2,000 acres will yield an assessed 10 billion barrels of oil. Just a little food for thought, especially if you don't like dirt cookies.