Let’s see if I get this straight. From a national environmental perspective, ethanol is good: A “green” alternative to gasoline, it burns more cleanly and emits fewer pollutants, including carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, toxic emissions, particulates and greenhouse gases.
But from a local environmental perspective, ethanol is bad. Most ethanol is processed from corn, and corn farmers use fertilizers, and fertilizers run off farmlands and into rivers and streams. According to a new study, farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed will plant 500,000 acres of cornfields over the next five years.
As the Washington Post summarizes the report findings:
More cornfields could be trouble, the study warned, because corn generally requires more fertilizer than such crops as soybeans or hay. When it rains, some of this fertilizer washes downstream, and it brings such pollutants as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed unnatural algae blooms in the bay. These algae consume the oxygen that fish, crabs and other creatures need to breathe, creating the Chesapeake’s infamous dead zones.
Governments around the bay have pledged to cut their output of nitrogen by 110 million pounds by 2010. But the study estimated that an ethanol-driven increase in cornfields could add 8 million to 16 million pounds of pollution.
Darn, environmental policy gets complicated! No matter how good an idea sounds, there are always economic or environmental trade-offs.
