Fueling the future in rural America

By JOHN BLOCK, CLAYTON YEUTTER and MIKE ESPY

This is the beginning of the driving season, and with gasoline prices being lower than a year ago, Americans are hitting the highways again. Should we now renew our concerns about relying heavily on oil imports from countries with unstable or unfriendly governments? And should we also be concerned about the amount of carbon we are adding to the Earth’s atmosphere?

Yes on both counts.

We should also recognize that there is some good news on the fuel supply front. We produced 9 billion gallons of ethanol in 2008, accounting for 7 percent of our gasoline sales. In doing so we eliminated the need for more than 300 million barrels of imported oil. That’s the equivalent of halting oil imports from Venezuela for 10 months (not a bad idea!) or halting all oil imports for 33 days. It also saved us $30 billion.

Notwithstanding that success, we still import about 70 percent of our oil, at a cost of about $475 billion a year. Could we not do better, accelerating our own production, thereby creating jobs while simultaneously reducing our trade deficit? We can do that through greater reliance on biofuels, where promising research suggests that we’ll soon be using feed stocks from products such as wood chips, agricultural waste and even trash, while we also benefit from increasing productivity in corn ethanol.

Just a few weeks ago President Obama announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency will form a working group to “aggressively accelerate the investment in and production of biofuels.” As former secretaries of agriculture under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, respectively, we are proud that “our” department will direct this effort for we know that biofuels can revitalize rural America while also contributing to humanity’s search for abundant foods and fuels.

Praise for ethanol

For all the obituaries that are written for it, the U.S. ethanol industry promotes economic growth, environmental sustainability, and energy independence. In the midst of a recession the industry last year opened 31 new bio-refineries and created 240,000 jobs. Production will rise again this year, to more than 10 billion gallons, constituting nearly 10 percent of our gasoline supply. We’re supportive of all our domestic energy sources — oil, gas, solar, wind, coal, biofuels and anything else that might emerge. But in our view biofuels presently hold far more promise than any of the alternatives. Much attention has recently been given to wind power, for example. But it provides less than 2 percent of our electricity, and it fuels no car or truck engines.

Ethanol, the leading biofuel, is beneficial to the environment as well. One recent scientific study indicates that substituting ethanol for gasoline can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 48 percent to 59 percent. And what the critics of ethanol conveniently forget is that its production process is becoming more efficient every year. It takes a lot less water, and a lot less energy, to produce ethanol (even from corn, let alone from cellulosics) today than it did two years ago or five years ago. There are critics who contend that biofuels may be helping on the energy front, but those benefits are more than offset by an adverse effect on food production. This is the “food vs. fuels” argument.

We have been involved with all facets of the food industry for a lot of years. We believe this to be a choice that need not be made by the nations of the world. Food and fuel are not mutually exclusive; we need not forgo one to have the other. Farmers worldwide have the production capability to provide both, and they’re prepared to do so if governments give them a fair chance.

Ethanol production is not swallowing up vast quantities of farmland here in the United States or elsewhere in the world. In the United States we grow twice as much corn on the same acres as we did in 1967, and we have by no means reached a peak in yields. Biotechnology will produce still higher yields in the future, while also making corn and other crops more drought resistant than they are today. The same will occur outside the United States as biotechnology advances are adopted by more and more countries.

X John Block was secretary of agriculture under President Ronald Reagan. Clayton Yeutter was secretary of agriculture under President George H.W. Bush. Mike Espy was secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.