The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 303
by the oil/gasoline industry. Since your bio on the Cato Institute website doesn’t
list any entrepreneurial business experience, I assume you have had none. This
would certainly account for why you are ignorant of how business works in the
real world. It might be polite to think that your lack of business understanding is
the reason for your poor business interpretations, and it would have been hopeful if your report to the Federal Reserve Bank demonstrated that you had
learned something about either real business or ethanol since the video interview you did with Stossel. Alas, that was not the case.
In any event, in a real-world situation, the production and distribution of ethanol
would rely on a business model that is significantly different than the oil/gasoline
model for production and distribution. There would be no long-distance shipping
of ethanol over the road or in container ships; it would never be piped from the
Midwest to the coast. For you to present this possibility in the Stossel interview
is just plain stupid. Those really involved in the study and practical production
of ethanol rely on a business model that has been proven successful in every
country in the world. It can best be labeled as the “Dairy Business Model.” The
ethanol would be produced locally, then picked up and distributed to retail outlets in the same manner as milk.
On this subject of local production, corn might be the source material used in a
given region, provided that it was the most economically viable for that local
market. However, cattails, switchgrass, cane sugar, beet sugar, seaweed, garbage, discarded paper, and wood chips, and wood remnants might be more
economical and plentiful. Moreover, cattails, switchgrass, and seaweed require
no expensive or environmentally harmful fertilizer (the requirement for fertilizer
to help grow corn is another canard often used by those seeking to discredit
ethanol). In fact, when it comes to cattails, switchgrass, and seaweed (garbage
too, for that matter), municipalities have to go out of their way to try and limit
their abundant availability. Therefore, the argument that the U.S. couldn’t produce sufficient ethanol from corn is a moot point, even if it were true, which it is
not.
In addition, opponents of ethanol will argue that among the reasons why ethanol
has negative EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is because of the
energy it takes to produce and run the farm equipment that is required to grow
corn. This is preposterous since it relies on the presumption that there is no
equipment currently in use by farmers that could be used to plant, harvest and
store corn, and that an entirely new collection of mechanized machinery and
storage facilities would have to be manufactured from scratch. It also fails to
