Biofuel policy has made it to the polls. Yesterday, the National Center for Public Policy Research, a nonprofit, non-partisan educational foundation based in Washington, D.C., released the results of a survey (PDF) conducted at the beginning of this month which claims to have found that most Americans -- "including those in the Farm Belt" -- want Congress to reduce or eliminate the mandated use of corn ethanol.
In response to the key question, "What do you think Congress should do now?" with respect to the Renewable Fuels Standard (which last December raised the minimum volume of biofuels used in the United States from 7.5 billion gallons a year in 2012 to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, of which 15 billion gallons is expected to be supplied by "conventional biofuel" -- ethanol derived from corn starch -- by 2015), 42 percent of the participants in the survey thought that that the mandate should be eliminated to reduce ethanol production and use. Of the rest:
- 25 percent wanted the mandate to be partly eliminated to reduce ethanol production and use;
- 16 percent wanted it left unchanged;
- Six percent wanted it partly expanded to increase ethanol production and use;
- and 2 percent wanted it significantly expanded to increase ethanol production and use.
Nine percent were undecided, didn't know what to answer, or refused to answer.
Even among people living in the Farm Belt, 25 percent percent said they wanted the ethanol mandate repealed entirely, and another 30 percent wanted it scaled back.
According to the NCPPR's press release,
The poll was conducted by Wilson Research Strategies, which surveyed 802 voting-age adults who are likely to vote in the 2008 general elections. It included 37 percent registered Democrats, 30 percent independents, and 29 percent Republicans. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percent at 95 percent confidence interval.
I'm not a statistician, but I gather that polls, if they are random and based on suitably stratified samples, can survey as few as 800 people nationwide and the results can still be considered representative. The results (see the end of the survey) do seem to be broadly representative of Americans in terms of gender, age, political affiliation, rural-urban split, educational level, etc.
This is not the first poll on ethanol policy conducted in the United States. The Renewable Fuels Association (the ethanol industry lobby) conducts polls regularly, and last October, released the results of a survey (PDF) of just over 1,000 adults which found that:
- 77 percent of Americans want the government to provide incentives to encourage refiners to reduce their use of oil and increase use of renewables.
- More than three-quarters (78 percent) maintain that increasing domestic ethanol production will help create new jobs and improve the economy in rural America.
- 58 percent believe more use of domestically produced ethanol will help reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
- Three-quarters (75 percent) of Americans view ethanol as somewhat important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with 41 percent viewing ethanol as extremely important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
and that:
84 percent of Americans believe something other than ethanol is at the root cause of rising food prices. Specifically, higher oil prices (46 percent), increased global demand (15 percent), and adverse weather conditions like drought (14 percent) were deemed to have a greater impact on food prices than ethanol production (seven percent).
If anybody knows where to find the actual survey questions, please post a link below.
Frankly, I don't know what is going on here. I suspect that education -- to use the term loosely -- has played a part. Tellingly, in the NCPPR survey, pollsters first informed respondents that Congress approved a law in December that doubles the amount of corn ethanol required in the nation's gasoline supply. They then explained that ethanol production is expected to use one-third of the U.S. corn crop this year, and more than that through 2015 unless the ethanol mandate is scaled back. A synopsis of the positions of both proponents and opponents of the ethanol mandate followed. Only after this prelude did they ask, "What do you think Congress should do now?" with respect to the mandate.
Meanwhile, over on this side of the Atlantic, where policy-makers are facing a more organized, and more-vocal opposition to the European Commission's proposal to mandate 10 percent "renewable fuels" in road transport by 2020, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, for some reason decided to run an online poll on his website, asking visitors to express their opinions on the proposal. The poll was worded as follows:
Should the E.U. stick to its target to reach 10% biofuels by 2020?
O Yes
O No
I first became aware of the poll on May 30, when a contact at the European Federation for Transport and Environment sent around an "all points bulletin" email drawing the transport-policy community's attention to the poll. As of that Friday morning, with around just 3,600 votes, the poll was running 95 percent in favor of the mandate. I suspect the high "Yes" vote at that time was because most of the visitors to the page had been members of the agricultural community. Apparently the EFTE's efforts to get out the vote were highly successful, and by the end of the weekend, the earlier results had been completely over-turned and were showing a majority for "No." By the end of last week (the last time I saw the poll still displayed), the "No" votes outnumbered the "Yes" votes eight to one out of approximately 60,000 responses.
Then the poll suddenly disappeared from view. The ever-helpful folks at CAP Health Check noticed also, and yesterday, they posted a note titled, "Barroso's disappearing biofuels poll." Here is part of it:
At the last count, some 89 percent of the 60,000 respondents had voted for the E.U. to drop its biofuels targets, which have been widely criticised for taking food out of the mouths of the world's hungry to put in the gas tanks of European vehicles. As of today, the poll has mysteriously disappeared from President Barroso's website, and nowhere has the result been announced. Has the President of the Commission been taking election advice from Robert Mugabe? [Emphasis in the original.]
Ouch!
Just a caveat: Unlike the U.S. polls, President Barroso's poll was not the least bit scientific. (It allowed multiple votes, for one: All one had to do was refresh the page.) But, apart from the mystery of the disappearing results, it does show -- at the very least -- the power of the internet and the surprising strength of Europe's biofuel-policy critics.
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Comments
View as Flat
Biodiversivist Posted 10:22 am
11 Jun 2008
Do not believe anything you read from the Renewable Fuels Association. I caught them telling at least one whopper.
Quoting a study commissioned by an organization that butters its bread with ethanol is tantamount to quoting a study commissioned by a coal company that denies global warming.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jonas Posted 10:43 am
11 Jun 2008
The U.S. must abandon the use of corn for biofuels, and instead invest in electric transport and carbon-negative biomass.
Cellulosic ethanol should be supported, but only and only if there are enough indications that the technology is near-market ready and only as a transitional technology that must make way for electric transport based on carbon-negative biomass systems.
The American public must be better informed about the future of clean, cost-effective and efficient mobility. There is no future in oil, corn ethanol, solar, wind, coal, gas or nuclear.
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:11 am
11 Jun 2008
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19765819&BR ...
Certainly does beg the question why we should base our energy economy on something as fickle as the weather.
Especially when we admit that the climate and extreme weather events are going to get worse.
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:17 am
11 Jun 2008
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24894069/
Apparently heatwave, not so bad for the corn this year. But other years it's bad.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/25/bloomberg/bxcom.ph ...
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Orfintain Posted 1:13 pm
11 Jun 2008
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:48 pm
11 Jun 2008
_
The stronger argument is that there's not enough raw biomass to do the job.
Or even more basic than that, there's not enough topsoil, fresh water, or phosphorous/potassium fertilizers to do the job.
Not even a "small part of the job" if we assume that food demands are climbing, and food yields will be falling due to bad weather.
And not even research will get us to some magical level where it works because frankly photosynthesis is pathetic at turning sunlight into energy.
_
(Yes I could provide sources, but it's late and I don't feel like it)
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amazingdrx Posted 3:17 pm
11 Jun 2008
This is known as "push polling" in politics.
Since we now know that ethanol actually doubles the GHG production per mile over oil, we know that a lie was included in this poll. It implied that ethanol reduces GHG. Thus the skewed result.
Here is a more accurate question: "Since we now know that ethanol produces twice the GHG of gasoline, would you favor it as a way to reduce GHG?" 85% no? Probably.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:30 pm
11 Jun 2008
Regarding corn prices, we sometimes forget the Canada factor. Here's a nice quote from an article by Roger Samson in the Montreal Gazette, "Biofuels should run on solar energy not on taxpayers dollars":
In Ontario (a net importer of U.S. corn), the combined provincial and federal subsidies last year were about 16.7 cents per litre of ethanol produced. This whopping incentive effectively creates a $64 per tonne subsidy for corporations to import U.S. corn to make ethanol in Ontario. And voila! Another driver of inflation on world cereal prices. Ontario taxpayers have deeper pockets than the poorest nations in the world and they are able to reach deeper into the world food basket to produce biofuels if they so desire.
This year, an additional 25 million tonnes of cereals will be taken out of the global food basket as taxpayer subsidies enable high-priced corn to be made into ethanol. Speculators are in their glory as they realize the U.S. will not have enough corn to meet the projected demand for ethanol, feed and traditional export markets. There is nothing they love more than a commodity shortage to drive up prices and so cereal grain prices have risen across the board.
Food inflation in the last year has subsequently increased by 4.5 per cent in the U.S., 6.9 per cent in Europe, 23 per cent in China, and 35 per cent in Sri Lanka. Not surprisingly, food crops for fuel are being vilified as a crime against humanity. [My emphasis]
Note: the 4.5% inflation in the United States is a forecast, made on the basis of information compiled by the USDA, some of it from several months past. It certainly was made before (on 19 May) the recent run-up towards $7 per bushel corn. (Note also that there is a lag in the transmission of futures prices into actual prices received by farmers. FAPRI's latest Agricultural Outlook (p. 81), produced at the beginning of this calendar year, foresaw farm-gate corn prices averaging just under $4 per bushel for the 2007-08 crop year.)
It is important that people understand also that the U.S. numbers pertain to the consumer price index for food, which gives a 45% weight to the cost of meals eaten outside the home -- i.e., it includes all the costs of transporting, preparing, storing, serving, and cleaning up any food eaten in restaurants, as well as the cost of the food that went into the meals. Any factor that affects the food CPI has to be divided by a very large number: around $1.1 trillion, which is how much Americans spent on food (including restaurant meals) in 2006. (Note: expenditure on alcoholic beverages -- an additional $155 bilion in 2006 -- is not counted in the index, so the food-inflation numbers do not count the higher cost of beer.)
These are only my personal opinions.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:42 pm
11 Jun 2008
The National Center for Public Policy Research web page (see the link at the beginning of my article) contains the original survey questions, and statistics on the answers and the demographics of the sample.
These are only my personal opinions.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:57 pm
11 Jun 2008
They asked a very long series of questions, then one that went like this: "If you knew your state senator was arrested for drunken driving would you vote for him anyway?" He actually was, so this was true. I said "Yes" of course.
But I smelled a rat. I demanded to know who this poll was for. End of "poll". Hehey.
I called my senator's campaign and notified him, they said thanks we will take care of it, calling it a push poll. Not really meant to poll, but to push votes away from my candidate.
This was 20 years ago, we are finally getting a new state senator, the good old fashioned democrat is giving his seat (after the small matter of a landslide election against a GOP lightweight) to a great local guy who was in the assembley a decade or so ago. His first campaign plan, get internet service for rural areas not served by the greedy ISPs.
Makes one proud to be a democrat.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 3:58 pm
11 Jun 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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justlou Posted 10:20 pm
11 Jun 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/business/12crop.html?_r ...
The corn crop is about as bad I have seen in Illinois in a long, long time. Much of it was planted late. Some has been replanted twice due to flooding. A lot is still under water with more rain coming. Some still has not been planted.
Several of us here predicted the consequences of a bad corn crop following the huge ramp up of ethanol production and how this could impact markets to the point that government intervention might be needed to ration a short crop. We did not have to wait long.
The corn/soy industrial complex has been very effective in persuading the public and public officials that corn ethanol has not had a large impact on food price inflation. Yet economic studies show that biofuels have caused about one third of food price inflation.
Much of the industry propaganda now points out that we are now too dependent on corn ethanol to back off feeding the monster, substantiating another of our predictions.
E85 is selling for about $2.95 per gallon in our local stations. But, were price reflecting current costs of production at $7.00 per bushel corn, the price should be at least $4.00 per gallon and once again, not competitive with regular gas or E10.
As others here have alluded to, and to redo a point
I have made here many times before, the current crop prospects and markets illustrate the lunacy of attempting to energize an infrastructure built on densely concentrated energy collected over eons of time with the annual production of extremely costly, risky and inefficient energy plantations that compete with a hungry planet for food production and a dieing planet for ecosystem services and banks of biodiversity.
When things go in a wrong direction, the current is strong to keep them flowing downstream. And the muddy rivers and streams flowing from the Midwest reveal just how much our way of life sieves out just a bit of the goody in all the resources we churn. And the same with the river of oil that seeps through our system with not much of any lasting and positive legacies to show for our waste.
We really are over the falls.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 10:41 pm
11 Jun 2008
These are only my personal opinions.
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Orfintain Posted 10:46 pm
11 Jun 2008
Typical Ethanol Production produces ~ 10% more GHG depending on the study, and doesn't go anywhere near "twice as much"
Don't choose the most radical study that supports you viewpoint and argue against bias that is called Hippocratic
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Ron Steenblik Posted 11:23 pm
11 Jun 2008
I assume that amazingdrx is referring to recent studies (like those published in Science) that also consider GHG emissions associated with the conversion of grasslands and forest land to make up for the crops diverted to fuel-making.
Even if all the growth in demand for food and feed could be met, AND biofuels produced, simply from improving yield on existing lands, it still begs the question whether it might be more cost-effective to pay land-oweners to sequester carbon rather than to grow feedstocks for biofuels. The answer will, of course, depend on the feedstock.
These are only my personal opinions.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:19 am
12 Jun 2008
A full fledged admission of the fakery involved in claiming fuel farms represent a GHG free carbon cycle is yet to leave the nest. Is it coming?
On the back of the other realization, that nitrous oxide released by chemical fertilization cancels 2/3 of the carbon uptake of the crop, this long neglected fledgling might fly. Nitrous oxide is no laughing matter when it comes to GHG effect, at 296 times the effect of CO2.
Fuel farming has lost the GHG debate. Politicians have yet to hear the news. But mass media is beginning to wake up. The alarm coming from academia. Mass delusional nedia would not listen to us bloggers, but I think some scientists did, thus the studies.
Farm biogas, organic ag, and wind farms are winning farmers over to the green side. Guzzle your biomass walking corporatists.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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John former Marine Posted 12:38 am
12 Jun 2008
Shu pas a vende.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:54 am
12 Jun 2008
Organic food and renewable electric powered transportation can replace both. Give it 20 years of energy/ag policy reform and it could happen. It is physically, scientifically, and financially possible, though politically improbable.
With the agribizz related GHG nitrous oxide producing 2/3 of the GHG effect that crops soak up as CO2, how could agrichem ever help the climate?
Every bit of agrichem destroyed carbon sink we can get needs to be employed to turn this climate disaster around. Organic farming sequesters GHG. Biogas from waste offsets 20 times the GHG that is produced when it is used as fuel.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:13 am
12 Jun 2008
These are only my personal opinions.
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John former Marine Posted 3:39 am
12 Jun 2008
Shu pas a vende.
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