That big bowl of cornflakes you are staring into this morning - it costs you more today because of dodgy environmental sentiment. And the milk you poured on top? Same thing, dearer because of questionable efforts to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, writes Dick Ahlstrom
All of these things cost significantly more today than they did just a year ago because people, particularly in the US, are trying to ease themselves off a bad oil habit in favour of the biofuel ethanol made from distilled corn mash.
Countries around the world, Ireland included, are trying to develop biofuels - renewable energy sources that can substitute for fossil fuels. Examples include petrol-ethanol mixes, biogas captured from sewage and biodiesels made from rape or palm oil.
Corn is an excellent biofuel source if you mash the kernels, ferment them and then distil off the resultant alcohol. The only problem is if you use the corn for fuel, you can't use it to feed cattle, chickens or hogs and you can't use it to flatten into cornflakes.
US farmers grow more corn than anyone else on the planet and the fact that so many of them are rushing to ship the product into ethanol production means the food industry is coming up short. Last year a bushel of corn cost about $2 (€1.50). Today it costs about $4 (€3). Even here farm produce is being affected by biofuel production. A tonne of wheat, which is ideal for making ethanol, went from €100 to €180. Farmers used to get about €840 per hectare but now they can make more than €1,500 per hectare.
Developing an alternative to oil is a worthy pursuit, but it is also probably a stupid thing to do if it diverts land from food production to energy production.
The woolly thinking behind many of the most popular biofuels is pointed out by Dr Jerry Murphy, the principal researcher in biofuels in University College Cork's Sustainable Energy Research Group in the Environmental Research Institute. The main problem is we keep thinking about corn and sugar beet for ethanol production and rape seed for biodiesel, instead of using waste material in anaerobic digesters to produce another sustainable biofuel, natural gas.
Biogas production would serve in many ways, he argues. It would reduce our growing organic waste mountain, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide and methane, and would result in a valuable fuel that could be used to fuel gas-powered buses, taxis and even trains.
The nice thing is valuable waste is all around us. The nasty liquidy fraction of our municipal waste stream makes up about 40 per cent of the total and this is really good input for the digesters.
Every cow slaughtered in our abattoirs releases about 220kg of "paunch contents", blood and other liquids, all of which are ideal for gas production, and we kill two million animals a year.
Current practice has this highly polluting paunch contents, actually partially digested grass, spread on land where it continues to release methane, otherwise known as natural gas.
But forget the waste and go back to the land. We would need three times our total arable land to grow enough rape seed to reach the EU's new 5.75 per cent target for transport fuel from biofuels. To reach the target using beet or wheat would require 138,000 hectares, about a third of our arable land. What would we do for food?
Again Murphy has a possible answer. Silage is an ideal crop for biofuel production, and the 5.75 per cent target could be met using only 20 per cent of our arable land. Grass grows just about anywhere here, leaving valuable arable land untouched. Think about that as you munch your expensive cornflakes.
