Opinion: Your summer driving in the E15 era

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Mere mention of yet another government favor for ethanol and corn-state office holders will line up like UPS planes into Louisville at midnight.

Midwest politicians have been rushing to that line for decades, shamelessly cheering for ethanol while filling the industry’s trough with an unending cornucopia of market-creating mandates, tax breaks, protective import tariffs and outright grants. It’s a result of ethanol producers and corn growers, supported by Big Ag’s bulging political muscle, deploying brigades of lobbyists in the U.S. Congress and every Midwest state capitol.

Forbes’ Robert Rapier writes that an industry so thoroughly reliant on government largesse is not sustainable. Take away taxpayer support, and the ethanol industry goes the way of woolly mammoths.

But the latest bonus is headed for rough landing, with taxpayers to pay more to fuel up their vehicles.

In the current case, Minnesota and other Midwest states sought and got a federal rule waiver to mandate availability of E15 gasoline (blended 15% with ethanol) through summer, something that’s been prohibited due to smog-inducing effects of the higher blend in warm months.

Higher refiner costs and, especially, the necessary use of expensive stock is certain to drive up pump prices. There are more complications here, all to the same effect.

E10 gas (10% ethanol) has been long available, thanks to a 2005 federal mandate that created an artificial ethanol market, further aided by an import tariff to keep out less expensive Brazilian ethanol (its sugar cane is many times more energy-efficient than corn in ethanol production). Advocates have been pushing for years to require E15 and, even, E85.

It all began in the 1970s when the U.S., then reliant on foreign oil, underwrote ethanol to promote energy independence and to reduce greenhouse emissions. Since then, new oil-extraction techniques have made the U.S. a net energy exporter, erasing ethanol’s initial purpose. Also, a University of Wisconsin report recently concluded that ethanol is actually 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline.

With Big Ag, corn growers have become so powerful that their support is considered needed to win rural support to gain elected office in the Midwest. Conspicuous patronizing of a single industry is bipartisan, with both major parties going to great (often silly) lengths to defend what the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense says is indefensibly “throwing good money after bad.”

Iowa’s ageless Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley, ethanol’s most powerful congressional advocate, insists he’s a “free-market conservative.” But that ideology is exactly opposite government’s outsized financial and market-creating support of single industry.

One is the oft-repeated claim that ethanol lowers pump pricing, but not with this new summer E15 mandate. Too, ethanol has noticeably less energy than gasoline, so any blend means lower fuel mileage.

Another is that E15, says Klobuchar, promotes U.S. energy independence. But the U.S. has been independent for years.

Another is that ethanol burns cleaner and its emissions healthier than gasoline. But any marginal benefit here is overwhelmed by the significant eco damage of growing corn.

Ethanol has increased U.S. corn production, with 25 million acres added since 2000, much of it on marginal, erodible land previously protected in the federal Conservation Reserve. Today, nearly 40% of the nation’s 93-million-acre corn crop goes for ethanol, something researchers say pushes food prices upward.

Corn is heavily dependent on chemicals and nitrogen fertilizers, whose overuse in Midwest farm country has polluted the Mississippi River all the way into the Gulf of Mexico. It also adds unhealthy nitrates to local groundwater, forcing closure of individual water wells and millions to be spent by municipalities to remove it from drinking water.

But, says the industry, ethanol production provides jobs. Yes, well, so do service providers of Medicare and Medicaid (rural hospitals, especially) and food assistance programs for folks who desperately need it — and these social safety nets are being radically shredded by many of the same politicians who prop up ethanol.