Money May Not Grow On Trees, But It's Piling Up In Corn Fields

In an ironic twist of fate, it may be that the biggest way Congress helps the environment this year is by doing exactly what it does best. That's right: nothing.

Forget this business of passing bills. We don't even need Republicans to waste their breath threatening a filibuster. All lawmakers have to do is sit back, relax and even wave their fist if they really can't resist. Still, they will have given environmentalists at least one reason to ring in a happy new year.

The win would involve corn ethanol, a beginners biofuel that's ready to stand without the $41 billion in taxpayer subsidies the industry has enjoyed for 30 years. Barring a spasm of action in the U.S. Senate, two outdated policies will automatically expire at the end of this year: a 45-cent-per-gallon subsidy for all ethanol and a punitive tariff on foreign ethanol imports.

Decades ago, as the U.S. stung from oil shocks and searched for solutions, the subsidies made sense. Ethanol emerged as a substitute for MTBE, a gasoline additive found to pollute groundwater, and offered the tantalizing promise of reducing U.S. reliance on foreign oil. In more recent decades, ethanol was also promoted as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The import tariff was to prevent foreign ethanol makers, largely from Brazil, from benefiting from U.S. taxpayer funds.

But a lot has changed since then. These days, the calls that Congress should allow the credits to lapse are growing louder and coming from all kinds of corners.

For one, ethanol made from corn doesn't give much environmental bang for its buck. The climate benefits are at best modest, since plenty land is needed to farm corn grains. And at worst, corn ethanol does more environmental harm than good, given that it also requires fertilizers and water to grow.

Just this week, a new federal report notes that fertilizer runoff from the corn belt is in large part responsible for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the second largest oxygen-depleted area in the world. What's worse, the tax credit, which goes to petroleum "blenders," ends up lining the pockets of Big Oil companies (insiders admit as much) to give them incentive to buy ethanol. Except that oil companies are already mandated under federal law to buy 13 billion gallons of ethanol this year and 36 billion gallons by 2022; the "incentive" is wholly unnecessary.

Advocates against government waste are also pretty riled up about this issue. Should Congress actually extend ethanol subsidies at its current rate for 5 more years, as some corn state lawmakers have proposed, U.S. taxpayers will foot a bill of nearly $30 billion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, annually, that sum is equivalent to paying 63,500 teachers salaries or 6-months of unemployment benefits to nearly 500,000 out-of-work Americans. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a report this year finding the corn ethanol industry is mature enough to stand on its own without the wasteful boost.

The ever-powerful Big Corn lobby, of course, argues from a different perch. They use grossly inflated figures to claim that ending ethanol subsidies would cost 112,00 ethanol-related jobs. In fact, a recent University of Iowa study found that number to be more like 407 jobs. Which means ethanol subsidies are the ultimate in money better spent: U.S. taxpayers are paying $15 million per ethanol industry job, per year.

And as our nation's ethanol policies help Big Corn, they also hurt biofuel alternatives with better environmental cred.Ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil, for example, has a much lower carbon footprint, but the import tariff severely limits its use. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the sugar cane ethanol industry has long-thrived without subsidies or protectionist tariffs—so much that, there, gasoline is the "alternative fuel."

Subsides aren't always wasteful, when they are actually put towards a socially beneficial industry that needs help finding its feet: solar energy, wind energy, or cellulosic ethanol come to mind. The technology to make ethanol made from agricultural wastes such as corn cobs, rice hulls, weeds and woodchips is just beginning to reach the commercial scale. Spending billions of dollars more to support those fuels would really help an industry that could truly lower the impacts of U.S. fossil fuel consumption.

Join Sweeter Alternative in signing this petition to tell your representatives to sit back and relax this December: Let the corn ethanol tax credit expire and the import tariff as well. Some may fight to actually extend these policies for a year or even 5 years, and we'll need to—for once–urge Congress to do nothing.

Photo credit: KevinDooley via Flickr

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