Read here. Despite Gore's recent admission that supporting corn ethanol was a mistake, Obama's EPA decided to up the blended gasoline from 10% to 15% ethanol. Then Obama and Congressional Democrats made sure the tax compromise kept the 45 cents/gallon ethanol subsidy as an additional bonus to Big Agri-business financial supporters. This was accomplished knowing full well that increased corn production for ethanol is grievously polluting waters, creating coastal area dead zones.
And not only is the ethanol policy polluting waters, its impacting local environments and wildlife habitats by pulling land out of conservation and putting it back in active crop production.
The corn ethanol problem continues to rape the American taxpayer due to gigantic subsidies, combined with a terrible impact on the environment - a genuine lose-lose proposition.
"This observation is reflected in the Crop Acreage Report released at the end of June by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nationwide, corn is being grown on 93 million acres this year, a 19 percent increase over last year and the greatest total number of acres in corn since 1944.....Farmers are growing more corn because strong demand—driven largely by the rush to produce ethanol for fuel—has pushed corn prices far above the long-term average. While the boom in corn provides economic benefits to agriculture, it also entails a number of environmental costs......One potential long-term impact of the current corn boom is pressure to move land out of the federal Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP.....Taking such land out of CRP can, by eliminating the filtering action of streamside buffer strips, have a negative environmental impact far beyond the small additional crop income.....A more immediate potential impact of planting more corn is increased nutrient pollution in waterways, a problem that stretches from the upper Midwest all the way to the oxygen-starved, “dead zone” that forms in the Gulf of Mexico each summer. At some 7,900 square miles, this year’s dead zone is the third largest since monitoring began in 1985.....Their study projected that going from half corn and half beans to two-thirds corn would lead to a 29 percent increase in nitrogen runoff. The beans, while they actually produce nitrogen, also act as a sponge to soak up excess nitrogen and store it in the soil more stably for later use by corn. Eliminating the beans disrupts the cycle, causing greater nitrogen runoff."
Additional corn ethanol postings.
