I finally received the books I ordered from Amazon, one of which is Cy Tymony’s Sneakiest Uses For Everyday Things. In the section Sneaky Energy Projects and Simulations he gives some interesting information. One such tidbit: currently in the U.S. less than 4 percent of the car market is diesel, while in Europe over 50 percent of the passenger vehicles are diesel powered (see note at end).
In this section he illustrates the Biodiesel Carbon Cycle. He shows that the renewable source for the fuel, such as Canola oil, is removing CO2 from the atmosphere, so the carbon dioxide ‘greenhouse gas’ is being removed as it is generated by the vehicles.
In the next section he discusses “E85”, also known as Gasohol, and how ethanol is made, which also requires the use of plants; at this time it’s mostly made from corn. It’s my understanding that the government passed a law that required vehicle makers to manufacture a certain percentage of vehicles, that were “Flex Fuel”, which means they can run on either gasoline or E85. As I drive down the road on occasion I see a car with the Flex Fuel emblem on the back, so these vehicles are out there and ready to run on E85. But in Southern California, I have never seen a gas station that sells E85.
And I believe this is the way it should be, and I hope it stays that way. Why? Because the whole E85 or gasohol idea has obeyed the law of unintended consequences (see note below). As a result of the drive to get more vehicles running on Ethanol, plants were built to process corn into ethanol. More corn was diverted to the plants, which increased the demand for corn. The price of corn went up, and other food products using corn became more expensive.
The price of corn that was being produced increased, so agribusiness (farmers) saw an opportunity to make more money by growing corn instead of other crops such as wheat, so they switched to corn. As a result, the supply of wheat and other crops was reduced, and their prices in turn increased. So consumers had to pay more for such things as bread.
As the supply of other grains in the U.S. became smaller and more expensive, the grains that were being exported from the U.S. to other countries was reduced as other less expensive grain sources were found. The world supply and demand of these commodities was being changed.
As the world population grows past the 7 billion point, the demand for commodity food such as these grains has been on the increase. But the supply of grains for food has been diminishing because of the above fuel demands, so there is greater pressure on the increasing prices. In many countries, the amount of farmland has been decreasing because of desertification caused by global warming, and because the suburbs of cities have sprawled into the country, causing farmland to be lost to urbanization.
But people don’t realize that there are penalties for growing these crops. Here in the U.S., the crops require fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides. All of these chemicals are made from fossil fuels such as petroleum. And these crops have to be cultivated, harvested, transported and converted into biodiesel and ethanol, which is done by machinery that runs on non-renewable fuels. So in reality, the ethanol that is being used is only partly from renewable sources and partly from non-renewable sources.
Do we all get the picture? The biodiesel and ethanol fuels aren’t as ‘green’ as they’re made out to be. And the law of unintended consequences has given us a change that has caused negative results for the population of the whole world.
Note: In his statement I smell some weasel words. When he says passenger vehicles, that could be a very wide selection of vehicles. For instance, isn’t a bus a passenger vehicle? How about a passenger train? In Europe, gas is twice as expensive as here in the U.S., so there are fewer cars, and more people take public transportation, so even though over half of the passenger vehicles are diesel, it seems that that doesn’t necessarily mean that over half of the cars are diesel.
Wikipedia gives three definitions for The Law Of Unintended Consequences, and this is the one I had in mind:
“A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse), such as when a policy has a perverse incentive that causes actions opposite to what was intended.”
The reason I wrote this blog was not to show just how this law applies to biodiesel and E85. I also meant it to help people realize that it also applies to other technologies that we are deploying. For instance, what is the real cost of solar electric power, in the amount of non-renewables it takes to build a large solar electric generating plant?
Update Aug 4, ’12 – I was watching America Revealed, where they trace sources of the foods we eat. They said that in the supermarket, one third of the items are made with corn. Also, California farmers use 80 percent of the state’s water. The remaining 20 percent has to meet a growing demand from an ever growing population.
Then there’s the European corn borer worm, which can ruin the corn crop. This requires the farmer to spray insecticide over the fields. So now that ‘renewable’ ethanol that’s made from corn really is using non-renewable fossil fuel, used to make the insecticide, and also the fertilizers used in the corn fields.
They said those round crop circles are watered by well water, which comes from the Ogallala aquifer deep underground. All that irrigation for the corn is depleting the aquifer, so there is another non-renewable resource that will disappear. And the water has to be pumped by powerful pumps, which again use non-renewable energy. You can now see the law of unintended consequences creeping in.