I was Correct About This and Truly Regret it.

Soon after Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi reaffirmed one of Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert’s worst errors as Congressional leaders, I opined against The Energy Bill of 2006. Sadly, God didn’t have enough of a sense of humor to prove me wrong on this issue. Linking the prices of food and grain by making them substitute uses for agricultural products has made the staples of life far more expensive than they were before we decided to save the planet and starve the peasants.

University of Minnesota Economist Benjamin Senauer describes the scope of the problem in terms of the opportunity cost of 25 gallons of ethanol. Senauer describes the trade-off below.

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

With 30% of American Corn now being used to mix into E85, this is a tremendous drain on the supply of grain. America’s corn crop recently ran at 140 Bushels /Acre, which corresponds with a yield of 10.35 Billion Bushels, according to the USDA. This is disputed by some, who claim the United States produces more. According to an economist with the Illinois State Extension Service, more was actually grown.

"Two of the most followed private estimates place the corn crop at 10.384 and 10.455 billion bushels, respectively, rather than the USDA's 10.35 billion," said Darrel Good.

The upshot of all of this is that the US cranked out 3.1 to 3.2 Billion Bushels worth of fake gasoline instead of feeding people. Given that there are 35.71 Bu in a Ton, (assuming this conversion across all agricultural products without loss of generality), than the US forswore 86.8 to 89.6 million Tons of food.

Vice Dr. Senauer, a ton of corn feeds five people, or produces 80 gallons of go-juice. According to Wikipedia, a Chevy Tahoe covers 13 miles on a gallon of E85. 80 gallons of pure Ethanol can be mixed into 533.33 gallons of E85. One ton of corn, mixed with the gasoline that’s actually flammable, allows said Chevy Tahoe to cover 6,930 miles of asphalt; at the expense of feeding five human beings for a year. Any economist will tell you that life is all about choices.

Extrapolating this over our entire food supply, and assuming all Americans drive vehicles that average close to Chevy Tahoe mileage; we, as a nation have made the following trade-off. 434 to 448 million human food years were traded in order to drive our vehicle fleet anywhere from 46.3 to 47.8 billion Chevy Tahoe road miles.

The United States could be stereotyped somewhat accurately as an overfed nation of Chevy Tahoe drivers. If only the United States were eating all the corn we grew, the trade I described above may make sense up to some marginal unit. Our poorest citizens die from Type II Diabetes more frequently than of famine.

However, the United States is a massive source of Corn to much of the underdeveloped world. In 1999, the United States accounted for 7.6 million of the approximately 23 million bushels of corn exported throughout the world. We fed 1/3 of the needy.

If 3.1 Million bushels of that amount is burned as an E85 component and not replaced, I hope that every Senator who voted for this fiasco gives generously to American Idol Gives Back. Reducing the US total to 4.5 million bushels, and the world export total to 20 million, obliterates our market share the way Toyota went off on the market share of General Motors. We go down from 1/3 of the world corn export market to a shade less than ¼.

That leaves those 440 million missing meal years. Adding that much scarcity to a market; drives the supply curve close to the origin of the sterile-looking graph in the Economics textbook. In real terms, The Working Man’s wallet gets Handy-vacced. Mona Charen quantifies that disgusted feeling we’ve all shared lately as we watched the cashier total up our grocery bill.

The inflation in food prices worldwide — prices have soared 83 percent in the past three years, according to the World Bank..

Not all of this can be blamed on ethanol or on biodiesel, but enough can so that even environmental activists question the continued wisdom of this path forward. Lester Brown sounds more like Milton Friedman than Rachael Carson, as he assesses the impacts of bio-fuels upon the greater commonweal.

In six of the last seven years, total world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. (See data.) The last time they were this low wheat and rice prices doubled.

Already corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are trading at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising. Soybean prices are up by half. If the United States were to suffer intense heat and severe drought this summer in the Corn Belt, rising grain prices could quickly take the world into uncharted territory. - The Facts About Ethanol.Org

India’s Minister of Finance sounds like far more of a man living in street-level reality than either Charen or Brown. Having your nation’s population take to the streets, pitchfork-in-hand and malice-in-heart, tends to focus the wandering intellect.

“When millions of people are going hungry,” Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s finance minister told the Journal, “it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels.” -NRO (25 April 2008)

All of this was supposedly being done to save Mother Gaea. Alternative fuels would fight Global Warming and wean us off our dependence on fossil fuels. Except for one big fly in the ointment: they do neither.

“…When the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline. In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol ‘pays back’ the carbon released by land-use change.”- (NRO; Ob. Cit.)

This gets us back to the real economic trade-off we were supposed to be making with the policy. Giving up a huge surplus in food, in return for E85 fuel, was supposed to make our vehicle fleet reduce its carbon footprint; without giving up substantial mileage over the aggregate. But like the $10,000 consumable batteries in a hybrid, the devilish, hidden details, makes the math turn South on another green technology.

While Americans fret over the disingenuous algebra of “Clean-Green Technology”, leaders in Afghanistan, India, and throughout the African Continent have a far more difficult equation to balance. A government that can no longer feed its population has broken its end of the social contract between the governors and the governed. The world has never seen an environment get trashed in the way it’s going to when these people wake up one morning and realize that their cornflakes are in the gas tank of Al Gore’s or George Monbiot’s H3.