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| Environmentalists look a gift horse in the mouth
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| “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” is a proverb that dates back to the 1540s which basically means when given a gift be grateful.
Literally, as horses age their teeth begin to project further forward each year, and so their age can be estimated by checking how prominent the teeth are.
The advice given in the proverb is: when given a present, be grateful for your good fortune and don’t look for more by examining it to assess its value. Attributed to John Haywood, a musician in the court of Henry VIII, it is advice that is not being heeded by the environmental community.
For decades environmentalists loathed big oil. They documented the damage caused from the pumping, transportation, and refining of oil into energy, and used their political muscle to place layers of regulations and fees on refineries.
So, when a new source of energy came along that was green and renewable, you would think they would jump for joy – wrong! Some of the most vicious attacks on the renewable fuels industry are coming from environmentalists.
Our fear of global warming has now become the biggest threat to the world’s wildlife and forests, warns Jesse Ausubel, one of the nation’s pioneer ecologists. “American farmers are clearing trees and draining wetlands to grow millions more acres of corn for ethanol, even though the United States would need to plant corn on virtually all of its 1.9 billion acres of land area to ‘grow’ our gasoline supply… That would wipe out our forests and wild species,” he said.
He is a fellow of both the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Resources for the Future. But, the future he sees is one where biomass energy will ruin the environment. It is not just bioenergy he opposes but also wind and solar, “New York City would have to turn all of Connecticut into wind farms to power its furnaces, air conditioners, computers and plug-in phones. The U.S. would need wind farms covering the land area of Texas. We’d have to take 150 square kilometers from nature, and ‘paint them black’ with photovoltaic cells to match the output from a single 1000-megawatt nuclear station.” Yes, you read that right; the man who helped organize the first UN World Climate Conference in 1979 is advocating nuclear power.
Ausubel’s big beef with bioenergy is buildings.
“Renewable fuels may be renewable, but they are not Green,” says Ausubel. “As a Green, one of my credos is ‘no new structures’ but renewables all involve ten times or more [structures] per kilowatt than natural gas or nuclear. Increased use of biomass fuels in any form is criminal.”
Buildings are also what bother Keith and Michelle Beaty of Delaware County, Ind. They are among a handful of residents who have filed a lawsuit against a proposed ethanol plant in Shideler, Ind.
They say the proposed plant will spoil their rural lifestyle. In an extremely slanted story called ‘The Darker Side of Ethanol,” the Indianapolis Star said the plant “would loom over the countryside. Trucks would enter and leave 24 hours a day. Smoke rising from a stack would carry chemicals that pollute the air.” This is a distortion of what a modern ethanol plant is like.
So Mr. Ausubel, nevermind the fact that biofuels produce fuel that pollutes less than fossil fuels. Forget that these new plants, which are regulated by environmental laws, bring millions of new dollars and jobs to rural communities. Dismiss the evidence that in the next five years we will be using many more materials besides corn and soybeans to produce renewable energy. Turn a deaf ear to the reality that ethanol, wind, and solar energy do not create toxic nuclear waste. The bioenergy revolution is one of the best things that is happening to our environment. It is not perfect, and not without problems, and not the total answer.
But on the whole, a transition to renewable fuels is much better than a continued dependence on dwindling fossil fuel and waste producing nuclear energy. So just keep shouting that bioenergy is bad.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be finding ways for this new energy source to benefit our lives, our communities, our economies, and our environment.
John Haywood is credited with penning another proverb, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Our new renewable energy sector will not be either. In time, however, I believe we will work through the problems and figure out the technology. To quote another Haywood proverb, “A good beginning makes a good ending.”
Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.
This farm news was published in the Sept. 5, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
| 9/5/2007 |
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