Ethanol Was Marketed to Help Agriculture. But It Fouled Our Water and Injured Our Health.

Just like his presidential predecessors – George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – Donald Trump has a thing for ethanol. But why? Inordinately expensive to taxpayers, monstrously polluting, and now linked to mounting cancer incidence in Midwest Corn Belt states, fermenting ethanol from a third of America’s corn crop would appear to sane people as an insane pursuit. 

Not to corn growers, ethanol refiners and their allies in farm industries, the White House, Congress, and farm state legislatures. Since 2005, when President Bush supported and Congress approved an energy policy act that required oil refiners to blend ethanol with gasoline to annually produce 4 billion gallons of fuel, ethanol has been a staple of agriculture and transportation.  

Government has since mandated that the volume increase to 15 billion gallons a year. Farmers are all about it. So are ethanol refiners. Some 5 billion bushels of corn are shipped to 187 U.S. ethanol refineries, most of them in the Corn Belt states at the center of the country. The corn producers and refiners earn $60 billion from the market, and billions more in tax incentives and subsidies.

Fields of Extremes

That’s a pile of money with enormous consequence. The U.S. industrial policy for ethanol produced a stunning expansion of America’s corn harvest from 11 billion bushels in 2005 to 17 billion last year. Farmers and associated allies count on ethanol to stabilize crop prices, increase farm revenue, and keep America’s mountainous piles of surplus corn from rotting in the winter rain and snow. 

But here’s one rub. The development of the country’s ethanol sector also yielded a commensurate increase in corn crop acreage to places where soil is thin or where water-intensive corn ought not to be grown, like Kentucky’s erodible hillsides or west Kansas, where irrigated corn is depleting the Ogallala Aquifer. 

Here’s the other scourge. As readers of Circle of Blue know, cultivating corn is generating a horrendous catalogue of ruinous environmental and health consequences. Corn fields are soaked in pesticides to kill insects and disease, and saturated in chemical fertilizer and manure, all of which drains into ground, surface, and drinking water. The waters of the Corn Belt are the most polluted in the nation and are linked now to serious health hazards, particularly the rising incidence of cancer in the farm counties where pesticides and nutrients are spread most heavily.

Decades ago, buried toxic wastes at Love Canal in New York generated such intense civic concern about chemical dumps that the government initiated the Superfund program to clean them up. Well, nearly half a century later it’s increasingly clear that growing corn with contemporary industrialized practices exposes people and communities to high levels of toxic chemicals and dangerous nutrients above ground. 

A field of modern corn is tantamount to inviting unregulated chemical plants to discharge poisons into your neighborhood. Only now, as the incidence of malignancies rises, are residents of the Corn Belt recognizing the threats to their health and well-being.

Corn’s White House Ally

That hasn’t dissuaded President Trump, who on his first day in office last year issued an executive order that the Environmental Protection Agency put into effect in May. The order called for increasing year-round production of E15, a 15 percent ethanol blend to a gallon of gas, that could increase ethanol volume by 2 billion gallons annually and add millions more acres to grow corn. And because E15 evaporates more readily than the more common 10 percent blended E10 fuel, it’s likely to produce more summertime smog, which is why the EPA has blocked E15 from being produced and sold in the summer.

Unless you’re a farmer, a refiner, or an executive of the chemical and equipment companies tied to corn and ethanol production, the value proposition seems demented. Propping up an agriculture sector that ruins water, pollutes air, increases the federal deficit, and causes people to get sick – often fatally – just doesn’t make sense.

Ethanol On Way Out

Here’s another piece of that foolhardiness. The ethanol market is in the throes of a long, slow decline. It’s the coal of liquid fuels. It has no future. It’s as though Americans are being required to spend money to buy cathode ray TVs, or rotary phones, or sails for schooners. 

Transportation here and across the world is being electrified. Gasoline consumption peaked eight years ago at 146 billion gallons annually and now is roughly 10 billion gallons less.  

The number of fossil-fueled vehicles in the U.S. peaked at 293 million two years ago, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Electric vehicles now number 4.3 million and growing. 

The value proposition for electric vehicles is so much keener than for ethanol. EVs don’t pollute the air or water. They don’t discharge emissions that increase climate change. The same is true for the electricity that can be generated from wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and batteries. EVs and the associated renewable sources of energy, two of the largest new industries of the century, already earn over $300 billion in annual revenue in the U.S., five times the size of the corn/ethanol sector.

But just as ill-informed and dogmatic as his quest to prop up the ethanol industry, Trump also is issuing executive orders and directing changes in law and incentives intended to diminish markets in the U.S. for electric vehicles and clean energy. He’s halted utilities from closing old and polluting coal plants. It’s reasonable to view such decisions as Trump’s deliberate intention to build a treacherous path to ecological and economic ruin in the U.S. 

But this is a big, pluralistic, scientifically capable country astride a wave of technology, history, and civic restiveness. Industrial agriculture’s mammoth pollution and menace is encountering serious legal and civic challenges from Michigan to Iowa and beyond. Electric vehicle and renewable energy markets are strong and growing in spite of Trump’s dangerous edicts. 

Like coal before it, ethanol will contract — its retreat measured in the farmers and residents it sickened and killed along the way. Trump’s interference won’t change that trend. It will only slow it down, and at a cost to the economy and national well-being the country will be paying unnecessarily for years.