AlterNet: The Folly of Turning Water Into Fuel

[marmar]

The Folly of Turning Water Into Fuel

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted March 22, 2008.

Agribusiness and politicians are sucking our country dry with mandates for biofuels.



With corn selling at record-high prices, Steve Albracht expects to have no trouble paying his electric bills this year. Albracht irrigates 1,000 acres of corn near the town of Hart in the Texas Panhandle and expects to shell out $180 to $240 per acre to run his pumps through the spring and summer. "In this area," says Albracht, "the water table has dropped, but nobody's cutting back on watering yet. There's still plenty down there."

Albracht won the 2005 National Corn Yield Contest in the "irrigated" category, producing a whopping 352 bushels per acre. In a region that gets an average of less than 18 inches of rain annually, Albracht and his neighbors apply anywhere from 28 inches to more than 3 feet of water to their corn each year. With the prospect of a highly profitable harvest, Albracht says he can afford to water generously this year. And he'll need to, he says, "because it's been a dry winter."

For once, times are good in the High Plains. Corn and other grains are selling like precious metals, and there is every reason to believe that prices will stay high. At the heart of the boom is the U.S. government's decision to rely on corn-based ethanol to meet a big part of the nation's demand for "renewable" fuels.

Most recent controversy over ethanol has focused on the its poor energy return; in growing corn and turning it into ethanol, you have to burn three calories to get four. With prices of fuel and other inputs rising fast, corn farmers won't be getting rich (except for those who happen to have oil wells on their property.) But selling their corn for such high prices, they can afford to sow more acres and burn more propane, diesel or electricity to pump more water than ever. A torrent of cash will be flowing through the nation's corn-growing regions, but the biggest price will be paid in water. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/water/79957/

[RC]

1. This is national suicide.

"the water table has dropped, but nobody's cutting back on watering yet. There's still plenty down there."

Quite often when you remove too much water from the ground, the ground itself drops and when that happens, you forever have reduced the storage available for the local ground water.

We are killing our planet for the next bottom line. But who cares? When bu$h/cheney get done with the middle East, Russia and China will have reduced the good ol' US of A to a glass parking lot, so it won't matter anyway.