Against the grain: President Obama wants us to support ethanol. How about we do something better for the American farmer?

• Author: Rogers, Heather

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On April 28, 2010, the U.S. Coast Guard was mulling a desperate "controlled burn" of a giant oil slick then bearing down on the Louisiana coastline. For nearly a week, 42,000 gallons of oil a day had been gushing uncontrollably from BP's Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. There was no longer any doubt that the U.S. faced one of the worst environmental disasters in its history.

Depressed as they were, however, many environmentalists saw a silver lining. If ever there was a teachable moment in which the president could drive home the need for conservation and green technology, this was it. Mindful of his chief of staff's famous advice to "Never let a serious crisis go to waste," they expected Obama to speak out forcefully on the need for more investment in mass transit, wind and solar power, electric cars--and maybe even to visit a "walkable" community to showcase the obvious lessons of the disaster. But instead, on April 28 President Obama traveled to an ethanol plant in Macon, Missouri.

During his speech he didn't mention the Gulf spill. Instead he used his time to remind the plant workers that his administration had devoted $800 million in stimulus money to the production of com ethanol and other biofuels. And he also boasted of a new Air Force fighter jet, "the Green Hornet," that could break the sound barrier burning fuel made of corn. "I believe in the potential of what you're doing right here to contribute to our clean-energy future, but also to our rural economies," he summed up.

In the eyes of many environmentalists, Obama might as well have just flown to Alaska and exclaimed, "Drill, baby, drill!" Thought leaders in the environmental movement and progressives generally have formed a strong consensus against crop-based biofuels in recent years, holding that biofuels, whether derived from corn or any other row crop, are doubly diabolical for seeming to be "green" while in reality being polluting. Far from reducing greenhouse gases, goes the charge, biofuel production adds to global warming while also eroding topsoil and exacerbating all the other environmental harms caused by industrialized agriculture.

Yet here was our supposedly very progressive president out championing biofuels--as, it turns out, he has done since his days as the senator from Illinois. Cynics will say that Obama is just making the same calculation his predecessors have: he knows that while subsidies for biofuels will never deliver energy independence, they are exceedingly efficient at producing votes in key races like the Iowa caucuses, or for winning over key farm-state senators to the cause of health care reform. This fall, with Obama's blessing, influential farm-state legislators are pressing to extend one of the industry's major subsidies, the so-called Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit. It has cost U.S. taxpayers $20 billion since 2006 and would run an additional $31 billion by 2015. The administration is also smiling on renewing another key biofuel subsidy brought to you by Bush: a fifty-four-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, which virtually eliminates foreign competition. And it's likely Obama's Environmental Protection Agency will soon increase the maximum mixture of ethanol allowed in gasoline from 10 to 15 percent.

Maybe political calculation is indeed what ultimately drives Obama to cuddle up to biofuels. After all, due largely to the way our Constitution and electoral primary system favor scarcely populated farm states, saying no to ethanol could cost the key support you need for your own legislative agenda. Taking the world as we find it, perhaps we just need to accept the reality that one way or another elected officials will always have us paying large subsidies to American farmers.

But this raises a question: If eliminating agricultural subsidies is a political nonstarter, what if we used those subsidies in ways that truly benefited most farmers while also achieving other important public purposes? As I discovered on a recent reporting trip through Iowa, many farmers there would welcome a way to break free of the ethanol-industrial complex. The people I met said they'd rather cultivate crops using ecologically sound methods, if they could do so and still earn a decent living. It's not as if midwestern farmers don't know--better than the rest of us-that growing crops for biofuels damages their soil and keeps them at the mercy of predatory multinational corporations.

Fortunately, there are policy choices the country could make that would preserve the heartland while also advancing other important public goals, from reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, to stanching the flow of nitrogen-laden topsoil down the Mississippi, lowering our energy use, and producing an American diet that doesn't leave so many of us both overweight and undernourished. But to achieve such a generative result we will have to work hard to overcome deep prejudice and cultural divides that leave most farmers today feeling scapegoated by blue state elites. We'll also have to make sure to get the basic science straight--to honestly assess whether any part of the biofuel project should have a place in this future too.

Today, biofuels come in two basic varieties. By far the most common is ethanol, an alcohol-based product usually distilled from corn and less often from sugarcane. It can be used as a substitute for gasoline. The other is biodiesel, which derives from oil-producing crops such as soybeans and canola. Neither is new. Henry Ford designed a version of the Model T to run on ethanol, and Rudolph Diesel's original engine burned peanut oil. But the economics of biofuels have always been challenging.

A century ago in places like Texas, if you so much as scratched the dirt crude would come bubbling to the surface. Biofuel production, on the other hand, was costly, thanks to all the land as well as labor required for sowing, fertilizing, cultivating, harvesting, storing, transporting, and processing. And the energy embodied in the fossilized material that spews out as oil and natural gas contains eons of stored solar power. By contrast, biomass, plant-based material used for fuel, contains only the solar energy it absorbed over its lifespan. In the case of annual crops such as corn, that's just a single growing season. Current research indicates that a refinery operating at the height of efficiency will produce as little as 1.3 gallons of corn ethanol while consuming as much as one gallon of fossil fuels.

Add to this the market power and economies of scale achieved by the Standard Oil monopoly and its more recent...