This is the new claim being thrown around by renewable energy proponents with supporting data by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Check the link here:

During the first quarter of 2011, renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, water, wind) provided 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy or 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. More significantly, energy production from renewable energy sources in 2011 was 5.65 percent more than that from nuclear power, which provided 2.125 quadrillion Btus and has remained largely unchanged in recent years. Energy from renewable sources is now 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production, with the gap closing rapidly.

Looking at all energy sectors (e.g., electricity, transportation, thermal), production of renewable energy, including hydropower, has increased by 15.07 percent compared to the first quarter of 2010, and by 25.07 percent when compared to the first quarter of 2009. Among the renewable energy sources, biomass/biofuels accounted for 48.06 percent, hydropower for 35.41 percent, wind for 12.87 percent, geothermal for 2.45 percent, and solar for 1.16 percent.

It’s questionable how well nuclear energy would survive without federal subsidies, but its worth pointing out the banality of what is being claimed above, as its clearly being used to continue the green assault against nuclear energy in favor of other sources that rely on even more federal subsidies. From the EIA report, nuclear energy produced 2.125 quadrillion Btus in the first 3 quarters of 2011. A combination of hydro-electric power, geothermal, biomass, solar, and wind produced 2.245 quadrillion Btus.

Breaking total ‘renewable energy’ production down percentage wise, we have (roughly):

• Hydro-electric: .795/2.245 =  ~35%
• Geothermal: .055/2.245 = 2.5%
• Solar/PV: .026/2.245 = 1.16%
• Wind: .289/2.245 = 12.9%
• Biomass: 1.079/2.245 = 48%

Roughly 83% (biomass and hydro) of the ‘renewable’ energy touted above isn’t favored by many present day environmentalists. Hydro-electric power production, while having low carbon dioxide emissions, upsets environmentalists for other reasons — so throw that out, noting that hydro was not included in California’s renewable energy targets. Wood-biomass is hated by many environmentalists as well, and ethanol (included by the EIA as a subset of biomass) is hated by almost everyone. Roughly 90% of the energy included in biomass came from those sources.

So if you add the remaining energy options, the ones that are favored by the Obama Administration showered with subsidies, you get 0.37 quadrillion Btus (from wind, solar, geothermal — which doesn’t receive the same attention as wind/solar), representing roughly 17% of the energy produced by nuclear power in the United States, and a much smaller fraction of total energy production.

Today the EPA announced its proposed 2012 Renewable Fuel Standard requirements:

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) established the annual renewable fuel volume targets, which steadily increase to an overall level of 36 billion gallons in 2022. To achieve these volumes, EPA calculates a percentage-based standard for the following year. Based on the standard, each refiner, importer, and non-oxygenate blender of gasoline or diesel determines the minimum volume of renewable fuel that it must ensure is used in its transportation fuel.

The proposed 2012 overall volumes and standards are:

Biomass-based diesel (1.0 billion gallons; 0.91 percent)
Advanced biofuels (2.0 billion gallons; 1.21 percent)
Cellulosic biofuels (3.45 – 12.9 million gallons; 0.002 – 0.010 percent)
Total renewable fuels (15.2 billion gallons; 9.21 percent)

Based on analysis of market availability, EPA is proposing a 2012 cellulosic volume that is lower than the EISA target for 2012 of 500 million gallons. EPA will continue to evaluate the market as it works to finalize the cellulosic standard in the coming months. The agency remains optimistic that the commercial availability of cellulosic biofuel will continue to grow in the years ahead.

Whoops! Mandating technological feats is harder than those Congresscritters thought. One of these days they will get it right. Unless some of the delayed-plants begin to seriously ramp up their production, I’d bet that the 2012 “mandate” will be lowered again from 3.45 million gallons. Note that no “qualifying” cellulosic ethanol (meaning zero gallons, of the original 250 million required in 2011) has been produced and blended into our petroleum as of now.

1. Ethanol Mandates: In an effort to further “energy independence,”* major agricultural producing countries have enacted Soviet-style production quotas for ethanol, a motor fuel distilled from food.

This year, about a third of the U.S. corn crop will be used to manufacture 13 billion gallons of ethanol. By law, that will increase to 15 billion gallons every year after 2015. The European Union mandates that ethanol distilled primarily from palm oil and wheat, constitute an increasing percentage of the fuel supply, ultimately 10% by 2020.

Global ethanol production is a new and tremendous source of demand for food that has had a significant impact on the price of grains and oilseeds. According to a report commissioned by the World Bank, global demand for fuels made from food accounted for nearly 70% of the historic price spike in wheat, rice, corn, and soy during the summer 2008.

2. Rainforest Protections: Burning rainforests is an important link in the global food supply chain. In Brazil, farmers are clearing the Amazon rainforests to meet rapidly growing global demand for soybeans. In Indonesia, they slash rainforests to harvest palm oil seeds for export to Europe.

Rainforests are an important source of food supply, but they are also revered by environmentalists as symbols of ecological diversity. In late 2009, a group of wealthy countries, including Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Britain and the United States, pledged $3.5 billion over the next three years to stop the destruction of the rainforests. It’s the first installment of a proposed $25 billion.

As I explain here, there will be no Malthusian famine, despite these stupid, anti-human policies

There are tremendous gains in production to be made in the developing world, especially in China and Brazil. And technological advances to improve productivity, such as biotechnology, will mean greater yields-per-acre and enhanced crops that can grow in previously inhospitable regions. In the long term, the world’s farmers will meet demand.

In the short to medium term, however, the global supply chain is going to be a problem. A natural disaster in America or in any other major food-exporting country could send the market price of food spiraling upward.

The most adversely affected by these boneheaded policies are poor people in developing world capitals that are dependent on the global grains and oilseeds market. The developing world has been urbanizing for decades, resulting in unprecedented concentrations of the poor in the world’s cities. There are no sustenance farms in urban areas; Instead, many of these cities depend on international trade for food.

*So-called “Energy Independence” is empty political rhetoric, as my colleague Iain Murray demonstrates in this paper.

In his speech earlier this week, President Obama took a brave and unprecedented stand against our nations reliance on foreign petroleum imports:

Now, here’s a source of concern, though. We’ve known about the dangers of our oil dependence for decades. Richard Nixon talked about freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. And every President since that time has talked about freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. Politicians of every stripe have promised energy independence, but that promise has so far gone unmet.

I talked about reducing America’s dependence on oil when I was running for President, and I’m proud of the historic progress that we’ve made over the last two years towards that goal, and we’ll talk about that a little bit. But I’ve got to be honest. We’ve run into the same political gridlock, the same inertia that has held us back for decades.

That has to change. That has to change. We cannot keep going from shock when gas prices go up to trance when they go back down — we go back to doing the same things we’ve been doing until the next time there’s a price spike, and then we’re shocked again. We can’t rush to propose action when gas prices are high and then hit the snooze button when they fall again. We can’t keep on doing that.

The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more and more expensive to extract from the ground. We can’t afford it when the costs to our economy, our country, and our planet are so high. Not when your generation needs us to get this right. It’s time to do what we can to secure our energy future.

Richard Nixon wasn’t the only one. As Jon Stewart pointed out last summer, the last eight administrations have warned against the alleged dangers of importing petroleum and provided a number of solutions to massively restructure the economy, none of which were successful. Stewart comments, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me eight times, am I a ****ing idiot?”

And yet we appear to be idiots, and more money will  be spent chasing pipe dreams with taxpayer money. The New York Times, today, congratulated Obama’s willingness to take on such a tough challenge and blamed the lack of progress on, wait for it, Republicans:

Beset by rising gas prices and Middle Eastern turmoil, Mr. Obama, like other presidents, decried the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. He also said there were no quick fixes and that a nation with only 2 percent of the world’s reserves cannot drill its way to self-sufficiency.

He then offered a strategy aimed at, among other things, reducing oil imports by one-third by 2025, partly by increasing domestic production but largely by producing more efficient vehicles and by moving advanced biofuels from the laboratory to commercial production.

These are achievable goals. Reducing oil imports by one-third means using 3.7 million fewer barrels a day. The fuel economy standards set last year by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation will yield 1.7 million of those barrels; the next round of standards, now on the drawing boards at the E.P.A., will yield another 1.7 million barrels. Advanced biofuels and improved mass transit could get us the rest of the way.

None of these goals will be reached if the Republicans who dominate their party have their way. One particularly destructive amendment to the House’s irresponsible budget bill would strip the E.P.A. of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles and stationary sources.

It would be great if biofuels and mass transit could get us all the way there, but they can’t. Despite decades of subsidies, corn ethanol has been unable to match the price of gasoline. The U.S. has yet to see even a fraction of 1% of our annual vehicle fuel consumption come from the *insert other hypothetical alternative fuel here* craze, but I’m sure an economically viable breakthrough is right around the corner. Electric vehicles might become the hybrid vehicle of the future, but don’t expect Americans to be convinced unless the range, charging capability, and price issues are solved. High speed rail isn’t thought to pass the cost-benefit test in most areas of the United States.

Republicans are certainly responsible for political gridlock right now (a great thing, one might argue), but plenty of attention has been paid towards these technologies by both sides of the aisle in past years.

I almost choked on a complimentary pretzel during a recent flight when I read the final page of the April edition of Scientific American, this country’s premier science periodical for mainstream audiences. The page was titled “Clean Tech Rising” and the subtitle read, “China outshines the U.S. as the top investor, while Europe is a close third.” It featured bar graphs indicating what different nations are spending on so-called clean energy, like biofuel, wind, and solar power. The attendant text warned that “The U.S. has been a major player in clean energy technologies, but China is now the leader.” It recommended that, “…stepping up U.S. investment could enhance the country’s competitiveness…”

Now, it might or might not be true that China is spending more than the U.S. on “clean” energy. The ruling Communist government is not known for openness and transparency, so I take “official” investment data with a grain of salt. However, it is unequivocal that the Chinese are building coal power plants at an unprecedented rate. Estimates vary, from 4 new coal plants every week to 1 plant every week. All we know for sure is that coal, and not renewable energy, is powering the Middle Kingdom’s meteoric economic growth. This is why China, which became the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases only three years ago, now has a carbon footprint 40 percent bigger than the next largest emitter (the United States).

The task of science is to present the truth, no matter how it might offend one’s sensibilities. By highlighting only China’s clean energy investment, Scientific American’s presents an unscientific half truth. It then compounds this error by making a policy recommendation (“Stepping up U.S. investment [in renewable energy] could enhance the country’s competitiveness…”) based on this half truth. The whole truth is that China’s competitiveness is predicated on its building coal power faster than has ever been done in human history.

Using Scientific American’s logic, the inescapable conclusion is that the U.S. should embrace coal, too, in order to enhance our competitiveness on the international market.

Instead, they blame those darned speculators (are they aware of the important role played by commodity markets?) again. The industry continues to find support in high places:

Speaking to farmers earlier this month, the Obama administration’s agriculture secretary said he found arguments from the like of Nestlé “irritating”. Mr Vilsack said: “The folks advancing this argument either do not understand or do not accept the notion that our farmers are as productive and smart and innovative and creative enough to meet the needs of food and fuel and feed and export.”

Well, the price of corn has almost doubled in the last 6 months. Now, its obviously unfair to blame this entirely on biofuels. Food crops are heavily dependent on a number of other important factors like the price of oil, the weather, crop yields, etc. However, with 35% of U.S. corn being turned into biofuels, it clearly has a major effect on the price, driving it upwards (and driving other commodities higher as well, as farmland becomes more scarce). Globally, U.S. exports provide about 60% of total corn supply.

As noted in the article above, this has consequences:

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, lashed out at the Obama administration for promoting the use of ethanol made from corn, at the expense of hundreds of millions of people struggling to afford everyday basics made from the crop.

Mr Brabeck-Letmathe weighed in to the increasingly acrimonious debate over food price inflation to condemn politicians around the world who seem determined to blame financial speculators instead of tackling underlying imbalances in supply and demand. And he reserved especially pointed remarks for US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, who he said was making “absolutely flabbergasting” claims for the country’s ability to cope with rising domestic and global demand for corn.

“Today, 35 per cent of US corn goes into biofuel,” the Nestlé chairman told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York yesterday. “From an environmental point of view this is a nonsense, but more so when we are running out of food in the rest of the world.

“It is absolutely immoral to push hundreds of millions of people into hunger and into extreme poverty because of such a policy, so I think – I insist – no food for fuel.”

Consumers in the United States aren’t being pushed into poverty, because food represents a much smaller portion of the budget. Elsewhere, riots have been started over the price of food.

Absent subsidies, the domestic ethanol industry would be much smaller, and would likely be blended in small amounts with gasoline. Even if you assume energy independence is desirable from a national security perspective, ethanol policy is completely incapable of bringing that to the U.S. The amount of land required and the effects on other commodity prices would be unfathomable.

Tim Searchinger had a nice op-ed in The Washington Post last month covering the hard to define role biofuels play in food prices.

A global food crisis is “forecast as prices reach record highs ^[1].”  “Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years.”  “Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs.” “Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.”

Drought is one factor in the price spikes.  Biofuels and ethanol subsidies and mandates are another major factor.  According to the UN, “large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors for biofuels is squeezing land suitable for agriculture ^[1].”

Ethanol subsidies have resulted in forests being destroyed ^[2] in the Third World, and caused famines ^[3] that have killed ^[4] countless people in the world’s poorest countries ^[4].

These subsidies are expanded in the global warming legislation backed by the Obama administration.  Its ethanol subsidies will result ^[5] in “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.”  The Washington Examiner earlier explained how the global warming bill backed by President Obama would cause deforestation by expanding ethanol subsidies, and thus increase greenhouse gas emissions ^[6] in the long run.   It was larded up with corporate welfare: 85 percent ^[7] of its carbon allowances were given away to special interests free of charge, thanks to lobbying that turned the bill into an orgy of corporate welfare.

Earlier, Ron Bailey wrote in Reason magazine about the “global food crisis” that has resulted in food riots across the world ^[8], in countries like Mexico, Pakistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Haiti, and Egypt.   The crisis, he notes, is caused by “stupid energy policies” in the form of ethanol “mandates” and subsidies, which result in the world’s breadbaskets producing less food and more ethanol.

In 2008, two prominent environmentalists, Lester Pearson and Jonathan Lewis, published a Washington Post editorial, “Ethanol’s Failed Promise ^[9],” which explained how ethanol subsidies and mandates are destroying the environment and fueling hunger and violence worldwide ^[9].

Turning one-fourth of our corn into fuel is affecting global food prices. U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation, hitting the pocketbooks of lower-income Americans and people living on fixed incomes. … Deadly food riots have broken out in dozens of nations in the past few months, most recently in Haiti and Egypt. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warns of a global food emergency.

Moreover, they noted,

food-to-fuel mandates are leading to increased environmental damage. First, producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy – most of which comes from coal. Second, the production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts, and some production facilities are reportedly dumping these in local water sources.  Third, food-to-fuel mandates are helping drive up the price of agricultural staples, leading to significant changes in land use with major environmental harm. Here in the United States, farmers are pulling land out of the federal conservation program, threatening fragile habitats. … Most troubling, though, is that the higher food prices caused in large part by food-to-fuel mandates create incentives for global deforestation, including in the Amazon basin. As Time Magazine reported ^[10] this month, huge swaths of forest are being cleared for agricultural development. The result is devastating: We lose an ecological treasure and critical habitat for endangered species, as well as the world’s largest ‘carbon sink.’ And when the forests are cleared and the land plowed for farming, the carbon that had been sequestered in the plants and soil is released. Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger has modeled this impact and reports ^[11] in Science magazine that the net impact of the food-to-fuel push will be an increase in global carbon emissions – and thus a catalyst for climate change.

In Human Events, Deroy Murdock explained how rising food prices resulting from ethanol forced Haitians to literally eat dirt ^[12] (dirt cookies made of vegetable oil, salt, and dirt), caused tortilla riots in Mexico, and fueled violent protests in unstable “powder kegs” like Pakistan and Egypt.

In 2008, finance ministers and central bankers called for end to ethanol subsidies and biofuel mandates ^[13]. South African finance minister Trevor Manuel called such subsidies “criminal ^[14].” Earlier, the Indian Finance Minister Chidambaram noted that ^[14] “in a world where there is hunger and poverty, there is no policy justification for diverting food crops towards bio-fuels. Converting food into fuel is neither good policy for the poor nor for the environment.”

The EPA is now ratcheting up ^[15] ethanol use, heedless of the fact that ethanol makes gasoline costlier and dirtier ^[16], increases ozone pollution ^[17], and increases the death toll from smog ^[18] and air pollution.  Ethanol production also results in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution ^[19].

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