Reason Magazine - Staff

The Biofuel Brew Ha-Ha

info@reason.com (Peter Suderman) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

In Germany, they call it "liquid bread." Here in the U.S., frat boys and hipsters cultivating an ironic air call them brewskies. Most of us just refer to it as "beer." But whatever your name for the stuff, there's little point in denying that people in both countries love their beer.

The difference right now, however, is that while we Americans can continue to toss 'em back as we always have, German beer prices are skyrocketing. Who or what is the culprit? Corporate greed, perhaps, or an alcohol tax designed to push German beer drinkers to kick their six-pack habit?

It's something far less spectacular, but potentially more insidious: biofuel subsidies that are pushing more farmers to ditch their barley crops—which are necessary to make beer*—in favor of crops that earn them lucrative subsidies from regulators trying to fight global warming. Topping the list of these subsidized crops are rapeseed and corn, ingredient which are used in the creation of biodiesel and ethanol-gasoline fuel blends which supposedly reduce the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming.

Thanks to these crop shifts, the price of barley has doubled in the past two years, an increase that eventually gets passed along to consumers. Some brewers have raised their prices already, and many others are planning on raising them soon. German beer drinkers are already feeling the hit on beers like Erdmann's Ayinger, which raised its price from 6.10 euros to 6.40 euros over the last year. That's roughly fifty cents a beer for Germans who consume an average of more than 30 gallons of beer person each year.

But that seems like a fairly small price to pay for such a worthy cause, right? After all, if, as scientists like NASA climatologist James Hansen say, global warming threatens humanity with imminent catastrophe from climactic shifts and sea level rise, then biofuels might be a little more important than brew prices.

Problem is, it turns out that even if you consider climate change a serious threat, biofuels are hardly an effective means of preventing it. In fact, they just might exacerbate the problem. These days, anyone saying otherwise—like, for example, European regulators—must be sloshed.

Two studies published in the journal Science at the beginning of February indicate that, rather than producing less carbon emissions than regular fuels, biofuels, once the full production costs are taken into account, probably produce greater overall emissions than their traditional counterparts. And the difference isn't tiny, either. According to one of the studies, "converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt' by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they replace." As Joe Fargione, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy and author of one of the studies, has explained, "carbon debt" is what results from the additional land clearing, beyond food production, needed to grow biofuel crops. Clearing land releases natural stores of carbon into the atmosphere; so greater reliance on biofuels means increasing our carbon debt.

But it's not just carbon emissions that pose a potential problem, and it's not just Europe that's feeling a biofuel-induced hangover. The United States, for example, spends close to $11 billion a year on ethanol subsidies. By encouraging the planting of biofuels at the expense of other crops, these subsidies pose a serious risk to the world food supply.

According to a report by the Hudson Institute's Dennis Avery, a former Senior Agricultural Analyst for the State Department, worldwide food demand is expected to double by 2050. So replacing millions of acres of cropland with row upon row of biological fuel wells is a dicey prospect at best. When biofuel crops replace food crops, we are, as Avery puts it, effectively "burning food as auto fuel"—giving all sorts of potential new meaning to those fast food-gas station hybrids that currently litter our interstates.

Adding to the problem is that most biofuels are not as efficient as gasoline. For example, according to a report by the Energy Information Administration, biodiesel actually reduces fuel economy, putting out about 11 percent less energy per gallon than petroleum diesel. Meanwhile, a gallon of fuel ethanol is reported to be equal to only .67 gallons of conventional gasoline.

None of this should exactly come as a surprise. Free-market think tanks have been issuing warnings about the efficacy and true costs of biofuels for years. Yet only now are mainstream media figuring it out. Time has run three stories on the issue over the last few months, including a cover story titled "The Clean Energy Scam." The New York Times hyped the Science studies with a lengthy write-up that leapt onto the website's most-read list. Rolling Stone recently ran an expose on the harmful effects of U.S. ethanol policy, and now even liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman's gotten into the act.

Part of the reason for all the attention is that it's becoming increasingly clear that biofuel subsidies, in addition to destroying crops and potentially accelerating anthropogenic global warming, seem to be indirectly fueling the destruction of the rainforest. As farmers switch away from soy beans toward subsidized biofuels and soy bean prices rise as supply goes down, South American farmers have expanded their land-clearing efforts in an effort to pick up the slack. When forests in the Amazon start burning, environmentalists start paying attention.

Better late than never, though it's worth making sure that environmentalists fully appreciate the law of unintended consequences here: Policies designed to increase use of biofuels contribute to global warming, reduce the planetary food supply, destroy the rainforests—and, oh yes, drive up beer prices. And yet both the U.S. and Europe are spending tens of billions a year on subsidies. Maybe we should grab a drink, while we can still afford one.

Peter Suderman is a writer and policy analyst at FreedomWorks. He blogs at www.FreedomTalks.org.

*The original version of this article referred to barley as necessary for "making hops." The mistake has been corrected.

Aaron Sorkin vs. the Moralists

info@reason.com (Peter Suderman) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:19:00 EDT

No one would ever accuse The West Wing of being anything but a defiantly liberal show. And in many ways, that was part of its charm: It wore its big-government liberal bona fides on its Brooks Brothers sleeves, dispensing with any of notion of cloaking its ideology in disingenuous objectivity. But for those who didn't share the show's political assumptions, it could also be frustrating to watch as series creator Aaron Sorkin orchestrated the show's events to match his ideological agenda.

Now, after a three year hiatus, Sorkin is making a return to television with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a series which chronicles the backstage travails of a Saturday Night Live-like sketch comedy show. The West Wing focused on the role of the Presidency as a society-shaping institution, and Studio 60 looks poised to do the same for television. And although the show retains Sorkin's unabashedly liberal outlook, its primary targets have shifted with the milieu: Instead of beating up on tax-cutting politicians, Studio 60 aims its wrath squarely at America's moralist censors and the FCC. It may turn out to be the sort of liberal programming that libertarians can love.

If tonight's pilot is any indication, Studio 60 is going to do for Hollywood and television what The West Wing did for government and the presidency: make an impassioned plea for the renewed relevance of what Sorkin sees as a declining institution by vigorously urging it to give up on appealing to the lowest common denominator and embrace the mores, tastes, and predilections of the cultured intellectual class. This means that instead of rightwing budget cutters and proponents of small government, the show's primary enemies are FCC indecency regulators and religious moral scolds.

Sorkin's oeuvre firmly marks him as a true-blooded big-government progressive. He is reported to have done uncredited rewrite work on Warren Beatty's hyperleft, rapping-Senator political fantasy, Bulworth, which bluntly argued, just to pick one example from its slew of liberal causes, that Democrats should openly embrace socialist healthcare. He also wrote the screenplay for The American President, which may be the only A-list romantic comedy ever to revolve around Congressional support for restrictive gun laws and environmental regulations. Heavily influenced by mid-20th century socialist playwright Bertolt Brecht who argued that theater should push audiences toward political action, Sorkin's work has often played like a sort of modernized Epic Theatre. With The West Wing, Sorkin's political fervor reached its zenith. Like a kid with a Hollywood-studio-funded sandbox full of Administration action figures, he staged dramatic predetermined battles between the Democratic forces of light and the Republican forces of dark. The show set itself up as a paradigm for the liberal ideal of classy, intellectually respectable government that could—and would—fix all of society's ills through well-funded programs and egalitarian idealism. Constantly railing against what it saw as pandering to the backward masses, the show argued instead that intelligent, educated, cultured people driven by good intentions could come together to create classy institutions that benefited society. All you need, the show seemed to say, is a Nobel Prize winning economist professor from the Northeast to run the country, right? Sorkin may have cast Michael Douglas and Martin Sheen as his fictional Presidents, but it always seemed as if he were personally running for official representative of the coastal liberal elite.

Studio 60 may not mark a new political direction for Sorkin, but it does shrink the distance between his brand of liberal politics and the views of small-government libertarians. The pilot opens with what is essentially a statement of intent: After an argument with a network representative about offensive content in one of the evening's planned sketches, an executive producer (Judd Hirsch) of a popular comedy show interrupts a live broadcast to make an impassioned speech declaring that television, as a medium, has gone to hell and that the FCC and uptight religious groups are largely to blame. Or, as he puts it, "The two things that make [networks] scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho religious cult that gets positively horny at the mention of a boycott." By the end of the show, we learn that the sketch that caused the initial disagreement is titled "Crazy Christians."

The producer's outburst exclaims that his network is "hell-bent on doing absolutely nothing that just might challenge an audience," and, as might be expected, it causes an immediate uproar. But instead of trying to gloss over the situation, a new network executive (Amanda Peet) takes the furor as an opportunity to refute the producer's rant by reinventing the show as a classy, astute program not afraid to push some boundaries. She starts quickly, ordering the show's new producers to open the following week's episode with the offending sketch. The clear suggestion is that by refusing to pander to bureaucrats and moral handwringers, and by relying on dedication and intelligence, Hollywood can still turn out relevant pop-art that succeeds both critically and financially. In other words, it takes the idealism that drove Sorkin's problematic ideas about the wonders of government and applies it to a private institution where it might actually succeed.

Now, Studio 60 is by no means a "libertarian" show. It seems too ready to be critical of the lowbrow pull that capitalism can sometimes exert (the producer's tirade includes angry references to the crassness of reality television), and, with the producer's labeling of TV as "this country's most influential industry," it will likely view Hollywood as too much of an instigator of social change.

But even with these caveats, it's refreshing to see a show take up the cause of free speech so bluntly and so eloquently. For even when Sorkin's ideas lack credibility, they always make for compelling, thoughtful drama. Sorkin has become one of television's most successful, respected writers by creating shows that appear to actually work on their own premises. They're the determined products of wit, class, and good intentions—and more often than not, they're dazzlingly entertaining. No matter which way he veers politically, Sorkin doesn't just argue for good television—he shows us how it's actually done.