“Fat vs Fuel”, part II: Biofuels Digest special report on Indirect Land Use Change, biofuels emissions, and American overeating

To what extent are biofuels a key driver of land use?

But here is a key question – are biofuels really a major, major driver of land use at all? Actually, no. Energy crops are a marginal use of land, compared to meat. About 70 percent of US corn and soy production is devoted to feed, not food, and not fuel. Feed for animals to provide meat, dairy and other livestock by-products.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the environmental organizations that are allied with Big Fat to save the world from corn ethanol, but I’m not sure they are looking at all the data and I completely doubt that they are taking into account the unintended consequences of cheap food.

In terms of data, two indirect land-use change model runs are getting huge publicity at the California Air Resources Board. A third, by Purdue economist Wally Tyner, has been completely ignored. The problem – those who have seen the runs say that the indirect land-use change impact is 75 percent lower in Tyner’s run than in the others.

In terms of unintended consequences, cheap food has its pitfalls. The price of meat plummeted on a constant-dollar basis relative to earnings between the 1950s and 1990s. What was the result? Easy to see. Look at waistlines.

We are taught in the Sierra Club that, as John Muir once wrote, “if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.”

What the heck is the environmental movement doing allied with Big Fat, which does more to keep people off their feet, at the dining tables, off the hiking trails, and out of the forests than any other market sector?

It’s not Food vs Fuel, but Fat vs Fuel

Dr. Alan Bittner was heavily criticized for using liposuctioned human fat to power his car, but perhaps he was a pioneer in a future US where overeating consumes more and more arable land and diverts land from energy production or raising crops for export

According to the FAO and the USDA , US meat consumption has increased 137 pounds per person since the 1950s, with a resulting increase in grain usage of 375 pounds per person (the grain fed to cattle and poultry). Cheese consumption has increased faster than milk’s decline, and Americans consume 179 extra pounds of milk, which uses up another 63 pounds of grain.

In short, dietary change in the US has resulted in an additional 438 pounds of grains per capita, or 8 bushels of corn. That’s 2.4 billion bushels of corn, enough for 7.2 billion gallons of ethanol, or 70 percent of the nation’s ethanol consumption. Since the 1950s are not remembered as a time of national starvation, let’s characterize that 2.4 billion bushels of grain as national overeating.

Or to put it another way, 15 percent of the nation’s cropland is devoted to overfeeding Americans. Now, that’s a land use change. But who’s modeling that?

Well, I can tell you. It’s being modeled by the California Air Resources Board but they are charging it to biofuels. How are they doing that? By assuming that any additional use of land anywhere in the world is the result of biofuel production, rather than feed production.

Now that’s food vs. fuel, for sure. Or rather, fat vs fuel.

Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger of California commenced his political career as President Reagan’s choice to head the President’s Council on Physical Fitness & Sport. Upon election as California Governor, Schwartenegger pledged to make California “the fitness state”.

What the heck is the state of California, of all places, doing making the world safer for overeating on the cheap by discouraging energy crops, instead of adding carbon penalties to the subsidized food onslaught that gets dumped on US markets in the form of cheap burgers, cheap pizza, and cheap cokes?

Exxon has long advised us to "put a tiger in our tanks", but we have forgotten the old Chinese proverb that "he who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount".

Fat vs Fuel is not about the fact “The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year,” as critics contend, unless we are discussing vegetarian diets in Burundi. Big Fat needs cheap grain to be able to sell in 2700 calories per day to Americans who should be consuming 2000. The grain that it takes to fill a flex-fuel car with E85 will get you about 23 16-ounce steaks, enough to feed a platoon of troops in Iraq about two thank-you barbecues for all their hard work securing a crude oil supply so that lobbyists can get transport in and out of Sacramento to make sure we keep putting that old Exxon tiger in our tanks each week.

But let me put the proposition put it another way. Last year, we imported, enough oil from Iraq to make 6.6 billion gallons of gasoline. If we had used the land for ethanol production instead of overeating, we wouldn’t have needed Iraqi oil. Tell it to the troops.

Now that’s a land use change I can get behind. Probably a simplistic argument, but any more simplistic than the argument for indirect land use change, now that we’ve gone through the data in just a little bit of detail.

I’ll give Professor Bruce Dale, Distinguished Professor in Chemical Engineering at Michigan State, the last word, because I called him yesterday to talk about indirect land use change modeling. “It’s pure bunk,” he said, “and intellectually bankrupt.”

Nuff said for now. More data later.

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“Fat vs Fuel”, part II: Biofuels Digest special report on Indirect Land Use Change, biofuels emissions, and American overeating

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