In FERN’s latest story, published with The New Republic, Tom Philpott makes the case for replacing corn grown for ethanol, in Iowa and elsewhere, with fields of solar panels.
“For all the backbiting and vitriol, the main candidates in the recent Iowa GOP presidential caucus agreed on a lot of issues, from immigration crackdowns (wonderful) to federal incentives for electric cars (evil),” writes Philpott. “But no topic brought them into more violent consensus than the sanctity of federal support for corn-based ethanol. The heart of the nation’s corn belt, Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of that industry; and Donald Trump and his long-shot rivals all vowed to maintain the federal policies that prop it up.
“On this point, they’ll find no argument from the presumptive Democratic nominee. President Joe Biden staunchly supports the practice of turning corn into car fuel, as does his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, who once served as governor of Iowa.
“Whether they know it or not, all of these politicians are calling for the government to puff up what is a particularly byzantine and wasteful form of … solar energy. You can’t grow corn without photosynthesis, which converts energy from sunlight into plant tissue. But to liberate this embedded sun power, ethanol-bound corn must be pulverized, inundated with water, fermented, and distilled into alcohol, which can then be mixed with gasoline and burned to power engines. And that’s after the corn is planted, doused with fossil fuel-derived fertilizers, shielded from weeds and insects with toxic chemicals, and harvested.
“There’s a more straightforward way to leverage the sun, one that could generate much more energy with a fraction of the fuss: the simple photovoltaic solar panel, which directly converts sunshine into electricity that can be fed into power grids that, in turn, charge up electric vehicles, which use energy far more efficiently than do internal combustion engines.”