Large companies that stand to reap billions in subsidies and tax breaks from these energy "sources" are selling them as the way to a healthy planet and energy independence for the United States. For two reasons, don't believe it.
First, consider "energy return on energy invested," or EROEI. This is how much energy we "earn" for every unit of energy we "spend" to get it.
Gasoline's EROEI ranges between 6-to-1 and 10-to-1, says Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. In other words, we get anywhere from six to 10 gallons of gasoline for every gallon we use to find oil, pump it out of the ground and refine it. But the EROEI of corn-based ethanol, the most common U.S. biofuel, is a mere 1.34-to-1, the Agriculture Department says. So even though an acre of corn can make 360 gallons of ethanol, only 90 gallons of that is "new" fuel.
The corn used to make the ethanol at your local gas pump exacts a heavy price from our land and water. The fertilizer required for high corn yields starts as a resource, but once it leaves farm fields -- and most does -- it essentially becomes poison, polluting our lakes and rivers, harming drinking water, and creating a huge lifeless zone at its final destination, the Gulf of Mexico. Corn production also uses actual poisons in the form of pesticides, and these too can end up in our water and even our food.
And corn plants have wimpy roots that do a poor job of preventing erosion. Millions of tons of superb, irreplaceable Midwestern soils are lost from fields every year because of corn.
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