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April 23, 2008Is Ethanol crossing an Ethical line? - UPDATEDJust last month I wrote at Pajamas Media:
Our food bill is certainly feeling the effects, too - and now we see food vendors limiting the amount of rice that may be purchased. So…thanks to the noble environmentalists, we’re not allowed to drill for the huge beds of oil we own; because we’re not allowed to drill and refine our own resources, our heating and fuel bills are skyrocketing, our grocery bills are rising and - most troublingly - we may be facing food shortages…and still mucking up Gaia, to boot. Doesn’t sound so noble to me. And so much for our “oilman” president freeing us from dependence on other countries. He did that about as well as Bill Clinton before him. Now, Professor Bainbridge is writing:
Yeah, it’s bad policy. But I’m wondering if it is also immoral? I’m sure that sounds extreme, and I don’t mean to. It also sounds very Roman Catholic, but I can’t help that; it seems to me that there is a morality question here - is it ever right to burn food for energy when people are hungry? Taking a line through the idea of things being used for the purposes intended, one might call burning for food both “disordered” and (when doing so threatens humanity) “intrinsically evil.” I just know it makes me uncomfortable as hell to consider burning fuel to zip down to Walt Disney World, if it means people somewhere else are struggling to get fed. UPDATED: Mr. Gore was unavailable for an interview on this subject. Of course he was. He always is when the questions are substantive and hard, and the press wants to do more than burnish his ego. http://theanchoressonline.com/2008/04/23/is-ethanol-crossing-and-ethical-line/trackback/ 23 Responses to “Is Ethanol crossing an Ethical line? - UPDATED” |
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
SJR
The Pink Flamingo
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Anchoress:
I was a farmer for years and I have to say that most of the people who talk about this do not know the first thing about it.
For one thing, ethanol has been around for decades. This is not some new greenie thing the environmentalists came up with. Brazil has been using it for years. Where was talk of ethics then? Hunger has been around for awhile largely because people are like Mugabe and Chavez screw up their societies so that food production is handled by people who are not really farmers.
For another thing, feed grains are mostly meant to feed livestock, not people and the grain used for ethanol can still be used for feed. So the idea that all this grain is going to energy and not food production is not true either.
For another thing the price of commodities stayed flat for years and because of that subsidies where higher. It was thought that higher prices for commodities would reduce subsidies and allow third world countries who can not afford subsidies to produce commodities and create wealth. For years that was the number one complaint: Low prices bad for the third world. There was also the desire to create more diversification in terms of energy as well as less dependence on foreign oil.
Now all of a sudden people are acting as if farmers are committing some sort of crime.
Near me in a little town with not a lot going for it a bio diesel plant went on line after years of construction. It was a huge deal and good jobs. Now it seems there is a question of ethics for these kinds of jobs?
Well how about the ethics of diesel fuel that cost more than $4 a gallon? Farmers can not produce $2 corn on that. And by the way corn prices in this area were about $4 a bushel 20 years ago. For some reason people think that while health care costs and housing costs and taxes and everything else goes up, the price of corn or wheat is not supposed to. A few years ago the price of wheat got so low that a lot people just stopped planting it.
As far as ehtics are concerned, if people are that concerned is it ethical for people to live in huge houses and gobble up farm land for their subdivisions while they zone farmers right out of existence?
If they kill all those bio diesel plants and put a lot of hicks out of work and the price of corn and soybeans collapse, farmers will not produce more, they will produce less.
The truth is corn has been used to make everything from fuel to plastic for years and if people had really cared about feeding the poor they might consider creating other forms of alternative energy while helping these people create wealth so that they can buy food. That makes a lot more sense than calling ethanol unethical..by the way, one of the best cattle feeds I ever used was cotton seed. Cotton, like corn is very versatile.
The truth is we can fuel out of anything from garbage to manure to tree tops to soy beans. But the real culprit here is the escalating cost of energy and the huge demand for raw material of all kinds from the growing Asian markets.
The problem is not a lack of food, the problem is poverty and out of control urban growth. So if the question is a moral one, maybe it is about priorities. BTW, I do not remember a time in my life when I was not hearing about people starving somewhere. Why is it people have gotten interested in this now? I think it is politics. The right has decided that Al Gore and the UN are interested in alternative energy sources and so we will now it will become political.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I messed up that last sentence. My point is this discussion is more about politics than ethics. That is the truth.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 pm
sjr:
The problem is high energy costs are going to impact food production, it is inevitable. And if you just concentrate on ethanol, all that will accomplish is collapsing commodity prices while leaving high cost of production in place. Not to mention create more economic hardship in rural America. I know that people will say the prices will not collapse if people are hungry, but then again a lot of the people we are talking about can not afford food at any price, they have nothing.
BTW, I think a lot of this food shortage stuff is hype. It is the latest disaster. It has been awhile since Katrina, so we need to invent a new crisis.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:10 pm
The sad truth is we throw out enough food to feed millions everyday. And if tomorrow energy prices and commodities start to fall and the demand for alternative energy abates, we will forget all about the ethics of feeding the poor. Once the politics go out of the issue, they will cease to matter.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Heh. I suspected I was heading into a topic too smart for me…but I still have reservations about burning food for fuel.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I must say I have had some satisfaction over this food crisis or at least the perception there is one. Forgive me. A good bit of my family are farmers , mostly Rice and Soybeans, and it nice to be appreciated. I have often talked about how the Nation’s food supply is a National Security issue but people are just used to the abundance.
That being said if we really got into a crisis the situation could be remedied on some areas by people in this nation using their yards as gardens.You actually use less water than you do on your yard. True one can not grow Rice and soybeans on it but there is a ton of produce and other items that can be grown. In fact I was reading some people have already caught on and selling a good bit of their stuff to restaurants
On a side note expect peoples attitudes to change toward all those migrant farmers that come and harvest crops nationwide. Needless to say we don[’t need the cost of labor to start going up as to farmers
April 24th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Well people could also stop using more water for golf courses out west than they do for agriculture. People do not just have to live in 7,000 sq foot homes. This is about more than ethanol.
My point is that we are saying we are using food for fuel. Well, soy has been used for a lot of things other than just food for centuries. And for years farmers were not really making money out there. And people complained about the costs of farm programs to keep them afloat. Now all of a sudden there is a big demand for what they produce and the prices are going up instead of down and some city folk are all upset about it. Well, folks, there are lots of things we can do to combat world hunger besides put the screws to farmers or shut down a bio diesel plant and render a lot of people unemployed.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Yes, But Is It Moral?
I belong to an interesting little on-line organization called Gas Buddies. It’s a way to keep track of local gas prices, and - what the heck - it’s free.
When you participate, you find out pretty quickly that ethanol is not very popular. …
April 24th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Not sure what to think about this. We should not abdicate our responsibility for each other to some Hidden Hand. Nobody likes to see corn burnt up (or milk dumped out) while people go hungry, but here are a couple of links:
In Burning shelled corn as a fuel, an Ag Professor at Penn State says “the world is not experiencing a food production problem. Instead the world faces political challenges associated with providing infrastructure systems for food distribution and storage.” Production may or may not be a problem, but in the midwest these corn stoves have been around for years. Interest in them seems to rise and fall with the prices of corn and propane.
The Wall Street Journal says Exporters Get Pinched as Ships Are Too Full to Meet Demand: “Surging foreign trade, fueled largely by the weaker dollar, is filling up ships faster than at any time in recent memory and created a backlog for companies like Reed’s, a Los Angeles-based maker of premium soft drinks, including cream soda and a spicy line of ginger beers.”
And not that other’s generosity has anything to do with my Christian obligation, but is whoever has all those petrodollars from >$100 oil spending that windfall to feed the hungry?
April 24th, 2008 at 8:24 am
A, you are right to raise the questions- & it does bring those who have the experience to answer them out onto the page. It doesn’t make you look “in over your head” at all.
I was actually wondering about ethanol myself because if it took more energy, manufacturing and oil to produce it than was smart or worth it, why bother? That wouldn’t make much sense to me- even if there is a shortage of oil.
We are dairy farmers up here- organic for the last four or five yrs. No pesticides, no antibiotics(unless emergency& then we have to sell the cow to a conventional farmer)- none of that stuff. It takes patience& getting used to, but it really is a good thing. I don’t live my life much differently, but i’m beginning to want to- to learn better, alternative ways. No hoohah, though :).
Listening to NPR- well, they must have the whole listening base in an uproar. Vegan is the new carbon emissions saving grace. Dairy and beef farmers are the polluters of carbon, etc, etc.
Is-fan… we have a farmer up here, on the Canadian border- that grows his own grains& soybeans. It sometimes is into December by the time harvest is over- andit takes a lot of deisel to do it, but it can be done up here. I can’t imagine the fields upon fields of grains out West. Amazing to me.
Terrye- as A would say: “Spot on”. It’s a scare game and guess who makes $$$$? Oh, & the price of organic grain/ton? Over 600$ now. Yikes. I never cared for subsidies- we get them for weird things and almost(almost) feel compelled to reject them on principle. Alas, we can’t afford it. ~sigh~
April 24th, 2008 at 8:57 am
It is another example of unintended consequences, at least to me.
First off, global warming alarmism is a crock and NOW scientists are warning of a new Ice Age again! Can you say that they don’t know what they’re talking about? I will.
Second, who makes the money? Try Al Gore and his merry band of environmental grifters! Not to mention all the people who are producing so-called “green” products at inflated prices. Meanwhile, those of us with functioning brain cells know that you don’t have to purchase some fancy new “environmentally sensitive” window cleaner when plain old white vinegar (which is also very AFFORDABLE) and an old newspaper can clean those windows more cheaply and efficiently.
Third, corn is more than just food for us, although I suspect some cultures would disagree completely (Mexicans for example). Cows - who produce milk (and therefore cheese) and meat - eat corn. As do various poultry critters who produce eggs and are also a source of protein for human consumption. But of course, nobody considered any of that in their equations to flimflam us into the exhorbitant eventual costs of this particular alternative fuel. And eventually those batteries wear out on those “smart” cars - where will they be disposed of? And what will be the cost of replacement?
Once again, in the cause of some faddish concern of these baby-boomers (who ultimately are all planning to live forever (not gonna happen) because of course, they were GIVEN self-esteem instead of earning it), those least able to protect themselves will be affected adversely.
Trendy is offensive to me and I’ll grant that at age 65 I’m reasonably fed up with all this fervid allegiance to the latest new thing. But whatever happened to common sense and a little independent judgment, folks? Do you have a brain? Have you used it lately? Like any muscle, the ability to think must be exercised regularly or it atrophies. That probably explains the rise of the ultra-left-wing in the past few years!
April 24th, 2008 at 9:36 am
[...] This hearkens back to the Anchoress’ point: Is the use of food for energy consumption -rather than for human consumption- morally acceptable? Yeah, it’s bad policy. But I’m wondering if it is also [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 10:08 am
[...] Interesting commentary from the Anchoress: …thanks to the noble environmentalists, we’re not allowed to drill for the huge beds of oil we own; because we’re not allowed to drill and refine our own resources, our heating and fuel bills are skyrocketing, our grocery bills are rising and - most troublingly - we may be facing food shortages?and still mucking up Gaia, to boot. [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Web Reconnaissance for 04/24/2008
A short recon of whats out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Ethics and politics cross and twine at many points.
“Feed grains” are grown on land which might be used for “food grains”; there is a fixed amount of arable land available to any farmer, and the farmer decides what to grow on that land in order to maximize his/her profit. If “feed grains” are being used for ethanol, they are being grown as “fuel grains”, not “feed grains” — and competition for that quality of biomass drives up the profitability of growing it.
The moral aspect comes into play when the ethanol created is not used for necessities of society (such as transporting other foodstuffs to market) but for recreation (as in allowing the Rich Democratic Presidential Hopeful to buy and fuel his Hemi-powered Chrysler 300 rather than a Smart). When people starve so RDPH can drive his 300 about town, that certainly falls into the morality category.
This covers the problem in a nutshell. Note page 12 — 1/2 acre of soybeans to fly a single passenger from LA to Washington DC. Page 13 says even more — if the jet fleet currently servicing the United States were to switch to 15% biofuels, about 10% of total US cropland would be allocated to building the necessary additive. Simple arithmetic says that if we needed 100% biofuel for that jet fleet, two-thirds of all our cropland would be allocated to growing that fuel. My point: there’s only so much cropland available, and food, feed, and fuel will compete for that land; with that competition, the price of food will rise.
Of course, we will need to get used to that, given the interesting chart on page 4 of the Boeing slideshow I reference above, which shows the levels of oil reserves available for use historically and into the near future. Is there a way out? Doesn’t look like it to me. But everyone who uses energy frivolously at some point in the near future will obviously be contributing to the starvation of a less fortunate human being elsewhere on the planet as more of our croplands are diverted to fuel production.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I agree with a lot of what Terrye, says, except for this:
…the problem is poverty and out of control urban growth.
In fact, I think that the “problem” is fundamentally a reduction in poverty.
Two countries, India and China, together make up about 3/8 of the population of the world. Both of these countries have been places where all but a tiny fraction of the population lives in abject poverty. Because of real gains in economic freedom in both places, HUGE numbers of people have become more prosperous. Because so many people are involved, even marginal increases prosperity has huge (global-sized) cumulative effects.
So whenever you see some “analyst” intone gravely that there are no fundamental reasons for the price of oil to be $120/barrel rather than $20/barrel like it was a few years ago, you know that the analyst is an idiot — 2 billion (with a B!) people moving up out of walking (or maybe bicycle-riding) poverty into scooter or car driving poverty is about as fundamental a reason as reasons come.
Now consider farming. Over the 35-year period from 1970-2005, American farmers drove down the price of corn (in real, inflation-adjusted dollars) something like 85%. (I can’t find the table so I am working from memory, but it is something like $14/bushel to $1.70/bushel.) This caused a quite freakish thing to happen — Americans have been inexorably driving farmers out of business all over the world for a generation. Think about that: American farmers have been so productive that it has been cheaper to buy grain from Illinois and Iowa and pay to ship it 10,000 miles than to buy the grain locally.
So what’s the basic arithmatic of that process? (Cost of grain in US) + (cost to ship the grain) vs (cost of grain locally). As the cost of diesel fuel went from $1/gallon to $4/gallon, you can see what happened to that calculation. The other thing that is not fully appreciated is that it’s not just the transportation part which is driven by the price of oil, but that virtually all of the cost of grain is now energy costs — diesel fuel to run the planters, harvesters and sprayers, natural gas to produce the fertilizer. The farmer’s time and energy, the equipment costs and even the non-energy costs of the other chemicals sprayed on the crops — all of that is “in the noise” compared to the cost of fuel.
So what happens when the price of oil quadruples? Well, the price of grain can’t continue it’s march towards zero. All of a sudden, the notion of transporting grain 10,000 miles becomes insane when diesel fuel is $4/gallon. People far away from the US will be drawn back into farming by their new ability to compete against US farmers and sell their grain locally. They become more prosperous than they were doing whatever it was that they were doing, and in those local economies the money that was going to buy the fuel to ship grain thousands of miles is instead staying in the local economy.
So back to the 2 billion Indians and Chinese whose demand for oil and other energy sources is growing exponentially. In the broadest macro-economic view, when people are allowed economic freedom, the population as a whole becomes inexorably more productive and creates wealth. As people become more productive, they become more valuable, so they command higher pay. As people become wealthier, they demand more stuff, so the prices of stuff goes up. But as the productivity gains are real, the value of the people goes up faster than the value of the stuff — so prices go up, but people become wealthier faster than the prices rise, and on net, they become wealthier over all. To take a concrete example: partially because of Indian engineers and Chinese computer assembly-line workers, you can buy a computer today for $500, which 20 years ago an equivalent speed computer would have cost $500,000. Because of the wages that the Indians and Chinese earn doing this work, they have gone from their fathers worrying about the crushing financial cost of buying a bicycle to worrying about how to safely use their cell phones while driving cars. This represents a tradeoff — some things get cheaper, while other things get more expensive, depending on the ever-fluid re-allocation of resources to their most highly-valued uses.
So, let’s return to the ethical questions. What becomes clear is that $20/barrel crude oil and $1.70/bushel corn was all about the lack of demand from billions of people too desperately poor to buy much. Their demand can be reduced, of course, back to what it was until quite recently, by the same forces that kept them in abject poverty for all those years. In other words, a return to the crazy impoverishing marxism and socialism that kept them down. Or we can adapt to a changing world where, a) some stuff gets more expensive while other stuff gets less expensive but on balance we rich people are still a little better off, and, b) our poor brothers and sisters get a LOT better off. If that’s not a clear ethical question, I don’t know what is!
April 24th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
“Heh. I suspected I was heading into a topic too smart for me…”
Stop that, Anchoress!
*************
Walter Williams is unimpressed:
…If Congress and President Bush say we need less reliance on oil and greater use of renewable fuels, then why would Congress impose a stiff tariff, 54 cents a gallon, on ethanol from Brazil? Brazilian ethanol, by the way, is produced from sugar cane and is far more energy efficient, cleaner and cheaper to produce.
…
The ethanol hoax is a good example of a problem economists refer to as narrow, well-defined benefits versus widely dispersed costs. It pays the ethanol lobby to organize and collect money to grease the palms of politicians willing to do their bidding because there’s a large benefit for them — higher wages and profits. The millions of gasoline consumers, who fund the benefits through higher fuel and food prices, as well as taxes, are relatively uninformed and have little clout. After all, who do you think a politician will invite into his congressional or White House office to have a heart-to-heart — you or an Archer Daniels Midlands executive?
Here’s an agricultural analysis of the ethanol subsidy’s consequences.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
[...] Cars Instead of People: Ed Morrissey and The Anchoress wonder if we should go ahead and feed people instead of cars. That’s far too sensible a plan [...]
April 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
cathyf has excellently stated the law of supply and demand in terms of ethics.
I wonder if the left really has figured this out — but I suspect not. After all, they don’t believe in supply and demand, even though they believe in uplift. Even our own poor live better than the wealthy in some countries, and, sadly, they will have to pay more too. There is no real fix other than war to the fact that China now needs oil too.
April 26th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Granny, sorry, I was trying to bring your comment out of the spam filter and accidentally deleted it…want to leave it again?
April 26th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
…And so much for our “oilman” president freeing us from dependence on other countries…
The accumulation of perceptions like this one led me to finally withdraw my support from Bush.
Afaic it’s the President’s role to see that the legitimate agendas of special interests are addressed in a way that redounds to the overall benefit of the nation.
**********
Instapundit quotes the Corner’s David Freddoso:
We have a program that makes us overpay for sugar, and now we’re going to start a new program to subsidize the ethanol we create from it — because without the subsidy, the inflated sugar price we’ve created will make the ethanol unprofitable.
Reynolds adds: Upside: Everybody involved has an incentive to pay off some Senators. That echoes Paul Volcker:
People have taken surveys of American opinion every year for years. One of these things where they ask the same question. Do you trust your government to do the right thing most of the time? Not a very tough examination. That used to be, 20 or 30 years ago, when we first met, the positive response was 70%. Now the positive response is 25 to 30%. I think that tells you something. The quarreling in Washington, the inability to get things done, the amount of money being spent to affect political outcomes or to create political roadblocks is, I think, damaging the ability of this country to meet the very huge problems before it.
Perhaps energy prices remain high partly because the markets believe that incompetence, corruption and fanaticism will block measures that would result in them coming down.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:43 am
[...] Is Ethanol crossing an Ethical line? - UPDATED [...]