(1) More Costly Food
Surprisingly, corn is used to make damn near everything we eat and drink including: (i) virtually any meat since corn-based feed is what cows, sheep, chickens, turkeys and pigs eat; (ii) all dairy for the same reason; (iii) just about anything sweet since high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, and other sweeteners are produced from corn; (iv) and obvious corn based products. (I bet you if you went to your kitchen and randomly selected an item, corn was in some way used to produce that item.) Plus, greater demand for corn means that more corn will be grown, thus reducing the acreage of other crops and jacking their prices too. In short, reducing the supply of corn available for foodstuffs will have a very significant effect on our grocery bills.

(2) Ethanol Production Requires A Lot of Petroleum
One researcher (Prof. David Pimental of Cornell U.) estimated that when all said and done, ethanol production uses more petroleum energy than the amount of ethanol energy produced. (In fact, his estimate is that 1 unit of petroleum energy is used to produce .59 units of ethanol energy). Another estimate (Michael Wang of the Argonne National Lab) is that there IS a net gain in energy production—that 1 unit of petroleum energy is used to produce 1.35 units ethanol energy. There are other estimates that fall between these values. In either event, we use a lot of petroleum and farmland to produce ethanol.

(3) Do We Want to Use Corn to Replace Petroleum Fuel or Plastics?
Corn is also recently being used to produce plastics as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. In fact, Wal-Mart even, in an attempt to quell criticism concerning its past negligence of environmental issues, has recently started selling corn-based plastic products. (See http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/august/pla.php?page=1) The idea is that corn-based plastics are more biodegradable—which is a big deal since petroleum-based plastics currently occupy 25% of landfills. With petroleum becoming more and more expensive relative to corn, it is becoming less costly to use ‘greener’ plastics. Higher corn demand and higher corn prices, however, will prevent corn-based plastics from becoming competitive with regular petroleum plastics.

Ethanol is not an end-all solution. Many of its positive attributes are mitigated and even annulled by complications. When first hearing about corn being used as a fuel, I thought of Marty McFly and Doc stuffing trashed cornhusks into the gas tank of a DeLorean (Back to the Future II). But that’s not even close to reality. Ethanol has many costs that are flatly ignored by proponents that rely on such an image. Given the amount of petroleum used to produce ethanol, the purported reduction in emissions is effectively displaced from mufflers to ethanol production facilities (which is a good thing usually). Along the way, our dependence on foreign oil is hardly reduced, and our grocery bills increase substantially hurting the poor most of all. Meanwhile we are not driving less, we are driving more since our corn fuel is being subsidized making gas cheaper to the consumer. Even if ethanol additives reduce emissions by 10% (the 30% based on an 85/15 ethanol/gas mix cannot be supported by current land usage), that is just a dent in an ever-growing Hummer. What needs to be done is reduce the sheer volume of fuel consumed by making the price at the pump reflect the total cost of fuel consumption, i.e. include the environmental and health costs. Only then will the effects of prodigious fuel consumption be checked by the real total costs, whether that of burning ethanol, petroleum, or anything else.