A Brief History of Corn Biofuel in Canada

A recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Corn-based ethanol: The negatives outweigh the positives, spurred me to do a little research about this. I had some opinions on the matter which I hadn't really taken the time to thoroughly examine, but I felt that columnist Jeffrey Simpson was being a little too gentle in his criticism.

According to a Library of Parliament primer, the federal government has been preparing for a biofuel push since the mid '90s - the Liberal Party era - through various economic incentives. In 2006 the Conservative government announced a strategy to have ethanol and biodiesel account for 5% and 2%, respectively, of what's sold at the pumps, which included $345 million for research and agricultural development. In 2007 that number was increased to over $2 billion, and a tax rebate for "green cars" was introduced. This is notable because the rebate was quietly removed from the 2008 budget. Which makes you wonder: why would it be better to funnel money into corn ethanol rather than low-emission vehicles? You might argue that it's simply a matter of spending efficiency, but the evidence would not be in your favour.

A recent report (among many similar ones) from the non-partisan C.D. Howe Institute is quite damning. It concludes that, even if corn biofuel has any positive net effect on greenhouse gas emission, the cost per tonne of CO2 reduction is seven times that of the alternatives. Furthermore the environmental impact of growing, harvesting, milling, transporting, and fermenting the corn is arguably worse than that of simply burning gasoline, and many of the published green-house gas (GHG) reduction figures are per litre consumed, which hides the fact that ethanol produces less energy, resulting in lower fuel efficiency. So even before considering all of the distribution-related factors, the decrease in GHG emissions is already slim. After considering other factors, it is possibly nil or even negative.

The main question on my mind is whether or not any of this was known when the federal government's policies were enacted. Most of the research cited in the Howe Institute report comes from the 2000-2007 period, which leaves a bit of uncertainty, but it seems clear that at the very least, there was significant debate about whether or not corn ethanol offered any benefits when the Conservatives made their big announcements. We have a great many ways to spend $2 billion with more clear-cut benefits. Why this?

Here are a few things we know.

• Canada's canola and soybean crushers were lobbying for the biodiesel move - precisely the one announced in 2006 - since well before the current federal government came into power.
  
• A side-by-side comparison between a map of 2006 federal election results and a map of agricultural land usage is fascinating, if unsurprising. Guess who voted Conservative?
• Food prices were already well into their rise in 2006 and corn ethanol was already a suspect at the time.
  
• Once upon a time, Kory Teneycke was head of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, a lobby group for Canada's biofuel producers. He has a history of involvement in politics, spanning all of Canada's major right-wing parties. His sister-in-law works as an assistant to the Prime Minister's wife. In 2007 he joined the Conservatives as Director of Research, and as of this month he's the PM's director of communications.
• Our Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Gerry Ritz, has a personal relationship with ethanol industry lobbyists.
• Many of these lobbyists have ties with the Conservatives. I don't have a unified source for this, but look up some names and the trend starts to become pretty clear. This is not particularly surprising or contentious, given that conservative policies tend to be most favourable to industry, but it's still worth bearing in mind because conservative policies don't tend to favour the environment. When they do, I tend to wonder what else is going on.

At the very least, there are some massive conflicts of interest and callously ill-informed decision-making driving the Conservatives' biofuel policy. That's being charitable. I'll let you come to your own conclusions, but my own is that Canada has been scammed, big-time.

Mmmmmm eely

First ever eel energy drink on sale

"The 140 yen (80p) drink costs about one-tenth as much as broiled eel, but has a similar flavour."

No thank you.

"Just another African mess"

What? Rwanda. Not my words.

I just finished watching Shake Hands with the Devil, a docu-drama about the Rwandan genocide. I'm not all that discerning when it comes to technical aspects of film so I won't comment on any of that. I was just happy to see a perspective from someone who was inside it all. "Happy" is not exactly the right word, however, since I'll probably be depressed for a few days after seeing all that.

Here are the highlights, to me:

When the genocide happened in 1994, I was 15. A year or two later I picked Rwanda as my country in a model UN debate. I took matters seriously, and did my research. There was already enough internet at the time, and I already had enough access to it, to find quite a bit that hadn't filtered its way into the available literature yet.

What I found that interested me most was that the Hutu government was propped up by France, and the Tutsi rebels were propped up by the good old USA. My conclusion at the time was that this was essentially a sort of neo-colonial proxy war. Perhaps evidence that a lesson learned in Vietnam was "don't go there yourself, just find a way to get the locals to do it for you". (And before the Afghanistan lesson: train them, arm them, mobilize them, and then cut them off when you're done? Bad plan.)

Anyhow, in the intervening half of my life I more or less forgot about those discoveries, or when I remembered them assumed that they were probably a product of some youthful naivety. The movie, however, supported my teenaged assessment, and it's worth noting that protagonist Roméo Dallaire - the Canadian general whose autobiography it was based on - was deeply involved with the film project.

His perception was that France's involvement took the form of evacuating the Hutu government leaders who had planned the genocide, providing weapons to their militias, and then attempting to bail them out when it was apparent that they were going to lose to the Tutsi RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front). There is also an unsourced claim in Wikipedia to the effect that French troops were directly involved on the Hutu side. Dallaire didn't have much to say about RPF leader (and current Rwandan president) Paul Kagame. He did, however, note that the USA was resolute in not getting involved until after the RPF was in control of the country.

Read a bit of Paul Kagame's Wikipedia bio (fairly well sourced), and something very odd may stand out. A Tutsi, born in Rwanda, raised and schooled in Uganda, later fighting in the Ugandan National Resistance Army. In 1986 he helped form the RPF, became head of military intelligence of the NRA, and joined the Ugandan military. And then "In October 1990... Kagame was participating in a military training program at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas...." Yes, four years later he was suddenly training in a US army facility involved in "leader development, collective training, Army doctrine, and battle command." What the heck? On top of that he is alleged by investigative journalist Wayne Madsen to have ties with the CIA. (I can't comment on Madsen's credibility; he does seem to be widely read, but his involvement in blaming the Bush administration for 9/11 paints him as a bit of a radical to my mind.)

So Kagame gets military training in the USA, goes back to Rwanda to take the helm of the RPF, and then wrests control of the country from its French-backed government while the rest of the world stands back and watches. Hmmm. We don't need to believe in the CIA ties in order to be suspicious here.

But enough of that. Somewhat more poignant and personal are the events leading up to Dallaire's request to be relieved from command. Throughout the unfolding of the genocide he was prohibited from firing on anybody unless fired upon, which often frustrated his attempts to protect Tutsi refugees. This being a movie, I repeatedly found myself half-expecting and hoping for a Rambo moment where Dallaire and his UN cohort just forget their god-damned orders, break out the machine guns, kill the bad guys, and save everybody. But they never did.

After successfully shipping most of the Tutsi refugees out to RPF-controlled regions, Dallaire began taking care of some goats on base, just in order to keep something alive amidst the corpses that seemed to be piled on every street. MILD SPOILER: At the end of the film a pack of dogs attacked his goats. At this point he drew his pistol and emptied the clip at them, and if I'm not mistaken this was the only time he fired a gun in the entire movie. I realized then that he must have wanted his Rambo moment too, but he was too disciplined a man to ever humour such an idea. It was only when faced with something that he was allowed to shoot at that the discipline cracked, and he let it all out on some dumb animals.

What people are afraid of, and dying with dignity

Light reading.

This is the sort of thing everyone is afraid of. I'm sure Maher Arar isn't surprised. A year of torture in Syria followed by exoneration and apology, but he remains on the terrorist watch-list for reasons that he isn't privy to. Canada's right-right minister of public safety found them unconvincing. Now we get a sense that Homeland Security considers itself to be engaged in a series of pissing-matches more so than anything else.

When people whine about the erosion of civil liberties, net neutrality, etc., it's easy to dismiss their fears as paranoia. But if you ask me, whatever can be abused will be abused. Let's conduct ourselves accordingly.

* * *

Randy Pausch has died. If you haven't heard of him yet, here's why you might care. Yes, it's over an hour long, but it's better than anything on TV. My main thought was, "When the time comes I hope I'll be able to face death the way this guy did." Perhaps that was the unmentioned headfake; this is how to live, and also how to die.