Published: April 19, 2008 03:53 pm            

MARK BENNETT: Instead of Issues

What affects your life more — the 1960s activities of one of your acquaintances, or the $3.49 gas you put in your car?

TERRE HAUTE — Fido was the Lou Gehrig of beagles.

When it came to watchdog duties, Fido showed up every day. Loyal. Trustworthy. I knew him for 11 years. He had a spine of steel. (Sorry, Evan Bayh’s Hillary Clinton TV ad has crept into my vocabulary.) Anyway, Fido gave our family his best in his time on Earth.

But taking Fido for a walk on a leash was always an adventure. He never heard the phrase “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Beagles like him follow their noses, sniffing the ground and marking their trail by … well … marking their trail. If you let Fido lead, you could end up way off track.

Which brings me to my point.

What affects your life most — the 1960s activities of an acquaintance, or paying 60 bucks for a tank of gas from the Middle East?

Some of the peripheral “issues” of the presidential campaign are admittedly interesting. Still, John McCain’s association with a lobbyist, Hillary Clinton’s memory of a landing in Bosnia and Barack Obama’s familiarity with a counterculture radical just take us way off track. If we look inside our own lives, those revelations don’t seem shocking or consequential.

Instead of wasting time on that stuff, it would be far more helpful to decide which of the three will work most aggressively to substantially lessen our country’s need for foreign oil. That would change America.

But it’s a complex issue. Sound bites on ethanol or biodiesel don’t capture attention like accusations of Obama being “elitist” because he dared to describe America without a shiny, politically-correct coating. (Pretty strange, considering Obama’s single mom once relied on food stamps, and he and his wife just paid off their student loans six years ago.) Yet we let such minutiae divert us in pointless directions, while Obama spent last week living the reality of Billy Joel’s line, “Honesty is such a lonely word.”

For what it’s worth, the energy situation seems a bit more grave.

Today, 86 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, which are oil, coal and natural gas, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rest is generated by renewable fuels — wind, solar and hydropower — at 7.4 percent, nuclear at 6 percent and, alas, biofuels at 0.3 percent. If current global consumption and development practices continue as-is, the Department of Energy predicts the combined use of renewable and biofuels will rise to just 8.1 percent by 2030, according to an Asia Times essay by Michael T. Klare, author of “Resource Wars and Blood and Oil.”

President Bush broke from a record of reluctance in 2007 by signing the Energy Independence and Security Act. It requires fuel producers use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. Current U.S. biofuels production capacity is about 13 billion gallons, said Wally Tyner, energy economist at Purdue University.

In their campaigns, all three presidential candidates have claimed they’ll lead the nation more aggressively toward a renewable fuels economy. But their stances on federal assistance for biofuels and ethanol production differ. Clinton and Obama favor it. McCain opposes it. Without commenting on McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, Tyner said the two Democrats “both are very strong supporters of biofuels, going far beyond what’s already in current legislation.”

Lately, critics have questioned the wisdom of investment in ethanol and biofuels, blaming them for high prices of food containing corn.

“Some of the glow is off, no question about it,” Tyner said by telephone from his office in West Lafayette.

Ethanol is made from natural substances, most commonly corn, but also from cellulosic products and waste. The increased demand for corn for production of ethanol, which is blended into gasoline, has indeed raised food prices, but Tyner said other factors have contributed too. Wheat and rice prices have jumped, thanks to diseases and drought. The improving economies of highly populated China and India have shifted food consumption there from grains to more meats and dairy products. Meat and dairy production requires more grain to feed cattle, driving up the prices.

Purdue estimates the demand for soybeans and corn for biofuel production accounts for about 17 to 23 percent of the increased food costs.

That’s thick stuff, with little fodder for “gotcha” political sound-bites. Yet it deserves full analysis by the voters. We should know there’s more to consider than just the base numbers on ethanol and biodiesel fuel vs. gasoline and diesel.

The miles-per-gallon value of ethanol is 70 percent less than gasoline. To equal or exceed the value of a $4 gallon of gasoline, E85 (a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gas) would need to cost $2.80 or less.

But there’s also a cost that doesn’t show up at the pumps. Using estimates from Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, Tyner points out that Americans pay $2 to $3 a gallon for gas in national security costs. (That would include the cost of fighting Middle Eastern wars and guarding oil routes.)

“If you take that perspective, [ethanol] is a bargain,” Tyner said.

Ethanol is not a “magic bullet,” said Nate Mosier, assistant professor of agricultural and bioengineering at Purdue.

Corn-based ethanol’s effect on food prices and availability has led researchers at Purdue and elsewhere to focus on cellulosic ethanol instead, as well as ethanol from Brazilian and Central American sugar cane. “No one’s thinking about corn ethanol beyond where it is now,” Tyner said. “What they’re talking about is cellulosic ethanol.”

However, there are no cellulosic ethanol plants operating in the U.S. right now, Tyner said.

Also, Mosier explained that transporting ethanol from its production sites — largely in the Midwest — to the coasts is expensive too, partly because of the price of trucking fuel. Sounds like a Catch-22.

“We’re really in the beginning stage of a transformation of our energy economy,” Mosier said.

At the risk of sounding elitist, perhaps we need McCain, Obama and Clinton to spend more time talking about this difficult situation, and less time sniffing the campaign trail for their opponents’ “gotcha” comments.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

        

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