I won't go into the other nonsense too deeply... 'destroying animal habitat' - you should come visit a corn field and see all the deer, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, coyotes, birds, etc which call it home ...then go visit an oilfield... see many animals playing in the fracking mud ponds or licking spilled oil off the ground? 'global warming' is a hard sell, but considering every molecule of carbon in an ear of corn came out of the atmosphere during that growing season, the worst that can happen is it goes back into the atmosphere when burned, and is pulled out again in the next crop. Every molecule of carbon in a gallon of oil or natural gas has been locked away underground for millions of years...it's also released when burned, but the next gallon of oil releases more and more carbon...no recycling. Not to say corn doesn't have some impact on the environment...most any human activity does. But painting corn as 'bad' in comparison to oil is laughable.
Sorry about the OT.
Yep. Agriculture does more harm to the earth than any other human activity. The amount of land used to produce food is vastly larger than the amount of land used for any purpose, and all of it was previously productive natural habitat. Bigger than space for all cities, towns, malls, roads, landfills and oil fields....combined.
Those Amazon rainforest destroyers....are farmers. Our ancestors did the same thing to the NA habitat. Most of the existing 'natural habitat' in places like southern NE has been clear-cut and burned a few times in the past, and put into (marginal) agricultural production. In Europe, it is more like 5-10 times.
Glad to hear there are some animals in the corn field. There are squirrels and birds in NY Central park, doesn't make it a nature preserve.
The ethanol thing didn't compete with food....just led to a lot more acreage planted. And that acreage increases soil depletion, fertilizer and pesticide runoff and yes, greenhouse gases associated with agriculture...NO2 from fertilizer and CO2 emitted when soil is plowed (versus absorbed when left fallow). A tiny example: turns out monarch butterflies were living on milkweeds in fallow farm fields...the ethanol project is crashing the population of migrating monarchs.
Grisu makes the important point. If it takes 0.6-0.8 gallons of actual oil to make a gallon of ethanol, then the bad far outweighs the good.
Don't get me wrong...many/most farmers are the heroes in this story...they want to conserve their soil, not waste fertilizer, and produce as much food per acre as possible, all of which minimizes their
100% necessary impact on the environment. My family eats their products every day. I am for any tech that improves yields, and leaving unneeded land fallow. I am generally against organic farming, as it reduces productivity per acre...it is generally a net negative for the environment relative to conventional. But minimizing the impact of conventional agriculture doesn't make it zero.
Public policy that ups the agriculture machinery of the US by 20-30% for no good reason other than politics? And dressing it up as a pro environment, energy security move when it is neither? Sick.
Don't get me started about bio-diesel...in the EU, it is mostly produced from palm oil coming from tropical plantations in East Asia. The European bio-fuel aficionados have led to a lot of tropical rainforest getting cut down...and while palm oil is more energy positive than corn ethanol, the emissions from cutting down the rainforest....prob make the whole enterprise a net CO2 emitter.
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