Grandfather used to sneak off to his camp in the woods where he’d brew a few gallons of “firewater” for special occasions. He would have doubled up in laughter if someone had suggested that one day, cars, trucks and his own farm tractor might run on this stuff. Almost intuitively, Grandfather knew that it took more energy to brew ethanol than the finished product embodied and that, in the long-term, growing crops for fuel would be an unsustainable exercise in mining the soil and in diverting agricultural output from where it ought to go, to the family table.

Too bad Grandfather’s no longer around to share his wisdom with the likes of George Bush, Stephen Harper or, for that matter, Elizabeth May.

Other people are ringing the alarms, however. A study by the Library of Parliament says that despite $2 billion destined for biofuels in the Conservative budget, the 10 per cent ethanol gasoline blend aimed for won’t make much difference in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but it will take 36 per cent of Canada’s arable land. Another study by Environment Canada admits that biofuels confer no advantage.

A study of the corn-ethanol cycle by Tad Patzek of the Berkeley campus of the University of California concludes that to satisfy 10 per cent of the U.S. fuel consumption, there will be an additional 127 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions as compared with the production of gasoline. Similar conclusions follow from studies by David Pimentel of Cornell University.

The fact is though, that ethanol science, in the U.S., does not speak with a single voice. Other researchers criticize Patzek and Pimentel for counting too many energy inputs in their studies. To get a handle on this controversy, we need to follow the money trail and to realize how big money can warp ethanol science. In the U.S., agribusiness giants, companies like Archer Daniels Midland, get to pass GO twice in their quest for government handouts: once for growing corn, a second time for producing ethanol.

Brazil now runs much of its fleet on ethanol and even produces ethanol for export. But to grow sugar cane for ethanol, Brazil is chopping away at the lungs of the planet, the Amazon Rainforest. Quite apart from questions of energy balance, these actions reduce the carbon uptake by trees thereby adding to global warming.

To satisfy the energy deficit needed in the production of ethanol, the U.S. is now burning coal in the distillation process. Illinois, a big agribusiness state with huge coal deposits, sees itself as an ideal place for the production of ethanol. But, coal-burning produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide for each unit of energy released. A sustainable process would use energy from ethanol to distill new ethanol but, there is simply not enough energy in ethanol to do this. So, GHG emissions go up, not down.

The impact of corn-for-ethanol on market economics, given the huge subsidies by the U.S. government, is already beginning to show its face. A recent Washington Post article documents that, in Mexico, there has been a four-fold increase in the cost of tortillas, a corn-based staple of the Mexican diet. Due, in large part, to the diversion of food to the production of fuel for Mexico’s largest trading partner, the increased cost of tortillas is now affecting the diet of Mexico’s poor. “Ethanol blend” now means that a child, somewhere, is having his or her diet affected, that a tree has been cut and burned in the rainforest, and that greenhouse gases have been added to the atmosphere, not taken away.

The Harper government enthusiastically mimics the policies of the Bush regime but this is no surprise. We now expect it. However, the Green Party of Canada has bought into biofuels, too. In a press release dated January 8, 2007, the Green Party of Canada stated “The Green Party strongly supports the development of biofuels as part of an environmentally friendly economyâe¦” as it critiqued the Clean Air Act.

That the Greens find themselves on the wrong side of an issue which threatens the environment and the food supply is cause for grave concern. The preachy, self-styled saviours of the environment have got it dead wrong, this time on their own political turf. It’s high time for the Greens to step off the pulpit of eco-evangelism and to get a grip on the facts. The Greens need more time out âe¦ this time, in the library.

Regardless of what transpires in Canada, the intentions of the U.S., the European Union and others to get into the large-scale biofuel production raises very serious concerns. With effort, the energy balance of biofuels may be improved but the diversion of agricultural land, from food to fuel, the assault on the world’s woodlands, the prospect of irreversible soil depletion and the social effects of market dynamics on the nourishment of human beings suggests that curbing the appetite for gasoline and diesel is a far better answer to building energy security and lessening greenhouse gas production. Starving Mexican children could be biofuel’s canary-in-the-coalmine.