Updated Friday, Dec. 28, 2007

Burning food charcoals witness

By Norman Jameson

BR Editor

A man with no business experience envied his friend who bought hats for two dollars and sold them for four. The novice opened his own hat store but to gain market share sold his hats for $1.50.

His more experienced friend asked how he intended to stay in business, selling hats for less than they cost him.

"Volume," said the new businessman.

There are many reasons to abandon ethanol as a fuel source before that bad idea becomes a curse that even volume cannot redeem.

Just three of the reasons are: ethanol is bad energy policy, bad economics and bad witness.

Ethanol is an additive blended with gasoline, that theoretically "saves oil." Most ethanol in the U.S. comes from corn.

Why should you care? American demand for corn - 20 percent of our crop now goes to produce ethanol - is driving up corn prices worldwide, nearly doubling in recent months. If the raw product doubles in price, everyone who eats corn based foods pays more.

Bad witness

Corn is a food staple for many millions of people. Americans absorb a price increase fairly easily but what of those for whom a tortilla is a barely attainable food staple at 20 cents? What happens to them when it is 40 cents?

With America's international good will at its lowest point in my lifetime, what opinion can we expect of the world's population about our habit of pouring liquid food into our fuel tanks?

I try to separate culture from religion. The two form a volatile and barren union. It is not always possible, however, for "American" missionaries in other lands.

They carry with them the baggage of this culture among people who know us only as selfish, arrogant and callous in our disproportionate use of resources.

Think of Lottie Moon whose name means missions for Baptists. In 1912 she fed her starving Chinese friends from her own scarce resource until she had no strength to live. Money and transportation issues kept her from receiving food supplies, but what if she had been forced to say "there is no food because we must feed our cars?"

What is the missionary's answer to a starving mother who wonders why Americans grind corn for their cars when her baby and 36,000 others daily die for want of a kernel?

Bad policy

Researchers David Pimentel from Cornell and Tad Patzek from the University of California at Berkeley say ethanol production in the United States does not benefit our energy security, agriculture, economy or the environment.

Ethanol is a distraction keeping us from pursuing more legitimate sources like solar, wind and hydrogen energy and costs $3 billion in state and federal subsidies each year.

Iowa State University economist Bruce Babcock says the country could actually face a shortage of corn as ethanol demand outstrips supply.

Americans somehow equate one gallon of ethanol to one less gallon of foreign oil. We don't consider the residual effects like a 7,900-square-mile patch in the Gulf of Mexico devoid of life because the nitrogen based fertilizers running off mid-west farms, into the Mississippi River, and down into the Gulf, are suffocating the fish, crabs and shrimp.

Bad economics

The cost of everything that includes corn goes up because of the demand by ethanol producers - from corn flakes, to sweetener to chicken feed.

But the overwhelming rationale to run from ethanol as fuel is simply the fact that the ethanol process requires 29 percent more fossil energy to convert corn into fuel than the fuel the corn eventually produces, according to the research of Pimentel and Patzek.

That process includes the energy required to plant, cultivate, fertilize, harvest, dry, store and process corn into ethanol.

But because we do not count all the costs, ethanol seems to be an easy supplement. And "easy" is the word Americans relate to better than any other, with the possible exception of "free."

About 3.6 billion gallons of ethanol were produced last year in the United States, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade group.

According to the research, we were able to produce those 3.6 billion gallons with just 4.6 billion gallons of fossil fuel. Sounds like the hat store owner dealing in volume.

I grew up in Wisconsin. Summer drives home through miles of tall corn in Indiana and Illinois renew me with peace and confidence that God is on his thrown and America's breadbasket is feeding the world.

Christians rightly advocate for very personal, intimate moral standards. But sometimes on issues that have the potential to negatively affect the entire species, we're not sure of the science, so we remain curiously silent. Maybe it's my agricultural background that elevates corn and energy to a higher profile.

Food and shelter are the two most basic human needs. When Christians ignore potential calamity on either of those we marginalize our witness. What hungry person wants to hear about Jesus from someone who pours food into his gas tank?

I encourage you not to help create a market for ethanol. If no market develops, the push for this grievous fuel supplement will die.

And we can concentrate on finding a way to get corn into people's bellies rather than our fuel tanks.