Rolf E. Westgard

As America’s corn and soybean crops wither in the current drought, it is time to reconsider our policy of mandating the conversion of a large percent of those crops into ethanol for our gas tanks. Even in a bountiful crop year, there is little sense in a food for fuel policy which takes nearly half of our corn crop for less than 10 percent of our gasoline supply. It can be sustained only by subsidies and mandates which increase prices for grains and the beef, poultry, and other products which depend on grain supplies.

As William Catton put it in his pioneering work, “Overshoot,” we are no longer mere homo sapiens, with little impact on the Earth’s environment. We are now homo colossus, each of us having the energy impact of the hundreds of slaves once controlled only by lords and kings. .

The Obama administration’s renewable energy stool, with its three legs of biofuels, solar, and wind, has now tipped over, as all three legs start to crumble. The final push came from the recent closing of Range Fuel Corp.’s cellulosic ethanol plant in Soperton, Ga.

Albertans love their lands and waters, and they are capable of guarding those assets without our help. Alberta’s government monitors all aspects of oil sands production. The province of Alberta has 147,000 square miles of boreal forest. A total area of 1,850 square miles is set aside for oil sands surface mining.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, a lawyer now turned petroleum geologist, announced to a South Carolina crowd recently, “Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. The day that President Obama became president,” she said,  “gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look what it is today.” 

Al Gore’s well-intentioned challenge that we produce “100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years” represents a widely held delusion that we can’t afford to harbor.