This week, a group of political leaders joined forces to reduce mandatory ethanol requirements, and op-eds opposing biofuels are appearing weekly in major newspapers around the country, including The Salt Lake Tribune. However, this issue is infinitely complex and needs explanation.
Most important, not all biofuels are bad. Articles that are specifically critical of ethanol production casually throw around the word "biofuels" when speaking about ethanol. This is like using the word "soup" to discuss the negatives of split pea.
The other major biofuel is biodiesel, which hardly affects food prices since it does not affect food production, offers drastic emissions reductions in nearly all categories, decreases greenhouse gas as much as 80 percent (as long as the land used to grow it was already agricultural), and finally, is highly efficient to produce.
Basically, it embodies almost none of the issues of ethanol production and has almost no similarities, yet people are still harping on biofuels collectively as something bad.
Meanwhile, due to reporting on so-called biofuels, biodiesel production has been unfairly affected and consumer demand has drastically gone down. We are even seeing this in Salt Lake City. As recently as a year ago, there were nearly a dozen biodiesel stations on the Wasatch Front. Biodiesel is still a darling in fleet vehicles in Park City and at Salt Lake International Airport specifically for emissions purposes.
But in Salt Lake City, consumers seem unable to differentiate between the two because even our media use the word "biofuels" to discuss ethanol, and most of these biodiesel stations are now gone. Biodiesel offered consumers one of the easiest ways to use an actual beneficial alternative to petroleum, and it was cheaper!
One of the biggest criticisms is about the farm bill and other subsidies that are now being applied to biofuel production. What is interesting is this agricultural policy has been in place for a long, long time, including 30 years of policy that developed high fructose corn syrup, the cheap sugary filler in food products today that is killing millions and contributing to our obesity epidemic.
But this same policy is now being applied to yet another production method, so-called "biofuels," and all of a sudden it is raising a red flag?
Meanwhile, we are in a fuel crisis at a level not seen in 35 years. We are losing American troops to military tactics specifically related to foreign oil, and oil is creating major environmental issues all over the world, including our own winter inversion. Utah ranks third among the 10 cities with the worst air quality in the country, a problem that costs millions of dollars in health care.
Petroleum supply is proving to be our No. 1 domestic security issue, more critical even than terrorism.
The beginning of the anti-biofuel trend and lots of information came from a $300,000 smear campaign from the National American Wholesale Grocers Association. Quickly the oil lobby jumped on and we are seeing millions spent now (to prevent the billions they could lose) to spread misinformation about biofuel. Sadly the media and American consumers are eating it up.
Meanwhile biofuels could provide millions of jobs on our own soil instead of Saudi Arabia and give income to farmers rather than already-rich CEOs.
Biofuels are in their infancy, as we face these issues with petroleum. Yet people want to kill the tree before it yields fruit, because it is not yielding fruit yet.
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* ANDRE SHOUMATOFF manages Biodiesel Motor Projects, a Utah consulting firm on biodiesel production and environmentally friendly automotive projects. Shoumatoff also helped develop some of the early Utah biodiesel infrastructure.
