How does a US govt requirement to grow ethanol end up killing fish?
Put down that Quarter Pounder the fish get it, via WSJ
That’s a conclusion of a new scientific paper that looks at what it would take to produce the amount of ethanol required by the federal government in coming years.
To hit the 2015 ethanol mandate, a lot of land currently set aside in conservation programs and other land used for soybean cultivation would need to be converted to corn. Growing all that corn means more fertilizer, which will feed into the Mississippi River and end up in the Gulf of Mexico.
The increased use of nutrient-enriched crop production is a key cause of “harmful algal blooms … oxygen depletion … and overall fisheries habitat decline,” the authors point out. In other words, to grow enough corn to meet renewable fuel standards will mean increasing the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
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