Can I color you shocked? Actually, I’m shocked that the Associated Press allowed this story to be published, and that WRAL here in Raleigh picked it up (but quickly buried it in the archives)
The secret, dirty cost of Obama’s green power push
The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America’s push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. When President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country “stronger, cleaner and more secure.”
But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
True, it is not entirely fair to blame all of this on Obama, as the headline proposes. Bush pushed it, as did Clinton, Bush 41, along with a host of politicians in both parties. Much of the article aims at Obama, who is a big supporter of this boondoggle. Hey, he’s president now. But, the blame should not rest on his shoulders only
As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and contaminated water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.
Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have been converted on Obama’s watch.
Wetlands have been destroyed, along with prairies and woodland areas, all in an attempt to plant corn to use as fuel, which even the NY Times noted a few years ago was a Bad Idea. Creating ethanol uses huge amounts of water, contributing to drought and the loss of aquifers, ponds, etc. You end up with even more pesticides and fertilizers leaching into surrounding areas and down stream. You can end up with giant amounts of nitrates in the soil and water, causing health problems. And using corn drives up the price of corn, which drives up the price of other foods. Same with soy.
And it does great damage to the real environment, not that silly “climate change” crap.
