Bandwagons are a desperately unfortunate fact of human life. More particularly, the blind ease with which people hop on them. Witch hunts in the middle ages, dirty-commie hunts in the 1950s, terrorist hunts today.
And biofuel.

Every politician in the industrial world, and at least one country and western star, sings the praises of replacing fossil fuels with corn or rapeseed or you name it. As I filled up my own tank with ordinary gasoline the other day, I was astonished to see a very small notice on the pump telling me that the fuel I was buying could include as much as 15 percent ethanol. It’s everywhere.

And I don’t trust it. Well, let me clarify that by saying the fuel itself seems OK. That’s not the issue. What concerns me, and greatly, is the speed with which we’re hiking down this highway without the benefit of good science or a big view of the implications.

We’re in the process of turning individual farmers and the big agribiz conglomerates into the new oil barons. Worse, we’re in danger of giving unscrupulous sorts a green light to rape third-world forests even further. Our own too, for that matter.

If we exploit acre upon acre of cornfields to produce biofuel, what will that do to the price of food? We can’t feed the world properly as it is. And if food prices rise sharply, won’t inflation rise too?

Lest you think I’m exaggerating the pace of this sea change, consider that fully a third of all U.S. grain production will be devoted to ethanol and other biofuels when the present construction of several ethanol plants is finished this year and next. A whole third.

Biofuel production in the U.S. reached 75 million gal in 2005, three times as much as in 2004 and a whopping 15 times as much as in 2001.

Further, have you heard of the ‘tortilla riots’ in Mexico earlier this year. No? Well, happen they did, because the price of corn in Mexico had doubled, making the average Mexican’s staple food dramatically more expensive. The reason for the sharp rise in price was that substantial portions of the corn crop had been diverted to making biofuel.

This isn’t just a North American phenomenon (and not yet Canadian because our biofuel industry isn’t well developed). In fact it’s an even bigger issue in Europe where the biofuel craze has had pretty good traction.

Given that they pay the better part of 10 bucks for a gallon of gas, you can understand why, but it’s worrisome to many because government policies on the matter appear not to be very sensible or imaginative. They’re offering subsidies to farmers who grow crops for biofuel use instead of food.

The issue is getting hotter all the time. The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) in the U.K., for example, is concerned that food crops will be in short supply and force hikes in the price of food and drink.

“It is essential that the EU [European Union] and national policies formulated to increase renewable energy are managed to avoid distorting the availability of agricultural raw materials for food and animal feed,” says the FDF.

And a report out of Germany by Deutsche Welle late in May said the price of beer is going up in that country because the barley used to make malt is increasingly being replaced by heavily subsidized and thus very attractive crops like rapeseed used for biofuels. Germans, by the way, drink a lot of beer, so this is no small deal.

The price of barley has doubled in the space of a year from 200 to 400 euros per ton, says Deutsche Welle. German farmland devoted to barley crops is said to be receding by five percent a year. Already, of the 30 million acres farmed in Germany, more than 15 percent are being used for biofuel crops. Beer-makers are calling for a cut in the subsidies granted to biofuel crops.

Consider that a 25-gallon tank filled with pure ethanol would be made with enough grain/corn/soy or whatever to feed one person for a year.

And how about this fact? You need to grow one acre’s worth of an oilseed crop to get the equivalent of 46.7 gal of crude oil. See where this is heading? Our thirst for fuel, and in the U.S. the thirst for energy security, will convert many, many acres of crop land from food production to ‘oil’ production.

It seems to me that we’re out of whack on this whole thing. I have no quarrel with the fuel itself, except that it has quite a bit less energy content compared to diesel, so you’d need more of it to do the same work. But there are very far-reaching implications to its mass use, and nobody seems to be looking in that direction.

Very large amounts of energy are used in agriculture. It’s the third largest energy consumer of all, in fact, not just to run the machinery used in crop production. That use pales in comparison to what’s required to produce pesticides and especially fertilizer.

So, what’s the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer? Yep, urea. And what’s going to be used in every 2010 heavy-truck engine if the emissions-control technology of choice is SCR, selective catalytic reduction? Yep, urea.

Looks to me like the price of urea is going to be driven way up. Isn’t that just a little ironic?