Remember your Grandma telling you that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is? Well that's the case with ethanol and other biofuels that are being hyped as the great solution to rising oil prices.

Gov. Mitch Daniels has jumped on the bandwagon along with other politicians and is calling for an increase in biofuel production in the state.

"The Indiana State Department of Agriculture's strategic plan calls for Indiana to produce and make available 1 billion gallons of biofuels by 2008," reports the Indiana Farm Bureau. Even some of the major environmental organizations are touting biofuels as a green solution to the oil crunch, as well as a temporary fix to global warming.

Biofuels typically include ethanol produced from corn and soybeans, while other biofuels are formulations of gas made from fermenting manure, wood chips and the like. Overall, about 15 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used to produce ethanol. But there are so many corn-to-ethanol plants under construction or planned for the near future, this could easily increase to 40 or 50 percent of the corn crop according to an industry consultant.

In Indiana alone, more than six new ethanol plants are under construction, with three other biodiesel plants in the works. State and local officials are working on tax incentives to encourage construction of even more. This will create new opportunities for agriculture, officials note, and will create more rural jobs.

But things are rarely so simple. If we could have identified and heeded the huge environmental catastrophe caused by the gasoline engine before we leaped into the gasoline age, we certainly would have moved there much more cautiously. There are several major problems with biofuels that make the "precautionary principle" leap to mind.

First of all, converting even more of Indiana's prime farm ground to industrial agriculture is way beyond shortsighted. Huge monocultures of corn and soybeans, much of it genetically modified, deplete the soil, as they require massive amounts of pesticides and fertilizers.

Such practices lead to topsoil loss and water pollution. It also means that these farmlands will be producing fuel rather than food. Proponents down play this aspect by saying that the world produces more than enough food for human consumption.

But according to Lester Brown at Worldwatch Institute, "This year's world grain harvest is projected to fall short of consumption by 61 million tons, marking the sixth time in the last seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand. As a result of these shortfalls, world carryover stocks at the end of this crop year are projected to drop to 57 days of consumption, the shortest buffer since the 56-day low in 1972 that triggered a doubling of grain prices."

What this means is that prices of food will rise, and if we have a bad weather year, food supplies could be terribly compromised. A report from the Canadian Farmer's Union in mid June, 2006 stated: "The world is now eating more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their lowest level in 30 years. Rising population, water shortages, climate change and growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilizers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's supplies in the near future."

In addition, as prices for corn and soybeans go up to feed the rapacious demands of the biofuels plants, more cash strapped farmers will leap on the bandwagon, perhaps turning marginal forested lands into corn and soybean producing wastelands.

According to an article "The New Biofuel Republics," Institute of Science in Society, March 2006, that's what has happened in Brazil, which is widely touted for its rapidly growing biofuel production.

"Soya plantations have displaced the forests of el Chaco in Argentina and the forests in Pantanal, Atlantic and Chaco areas in Paraguay. Even more dramatically the Amazon, Pantanal and Atlantic forests in Brazil have all been cut down for soya." How much that will happen in Indiana is anybody's guess.

Though proponents of biofuels maintain that ethanol will save the consumer money, their arguments are on shaky ground. While some studies have found that biofuels are cost-effective, most of those haven't included the massive government subsidies or the widespread environmental damage caused by extensive pesticide and fertilizer use. And many of them have been funded by the biofuels industry.

As agro-economist David Pimentel of Cornell University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other research groups have shown, there is not a large return of invested energy from ethanol. The Pimental study found that ethanol requires more fossil fuel energy than the fuel produced, anywhere from 29 percent from corn to 57 percent more from biomass.

Clearly this is not a cost effective product. In addition, it's important to note that as gasoline prices continue to rise, so will the price of biofuel.

Ethanol is currently used in 15 percent mixes with gasoline. According to the Earth Policy Institute: "There is also the fact that while ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline, it only produces about 70 percent of the energy and therefore gets 25-30 percent less mileage. If ethanol and gasoline are selling in the vicinity of $3 at the pump, then, in reality, you are paying $4 a gallon in comparison to sticking with plain old gasoline." The only beneficiary of the biofuels craze will be the agribusiness industry.

The notion that we can slow global warming by using more biofuel is equally specious. Despite the observation that the crops themselves will absorb any carbon dioxide produced in the process of production and driving, it is more probable that other greenhouse gases are generated as a product of the crop itself, the processing, refining, transport and distribution of the fuel.

In fact, according to a recent report in Oilwatch, the NRDC gave evidence that combustion products of ethanol include formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, both known carcinogens, and that increased use of ethanol may also increase atmospheric levels of peroxyacetylnitrate (a genotoxic that creates birth defects.). Studies in California concluded that ethanol increased ozone, and air pollution was worse after 10 percent ethanol was mandated in 2003 to be mixed into fuel for cars. Other studies document the relationship of ethanol to smog.

What we're having trouble accepting is that the only way to kick our dependence on foreign oil and to slow global warming is to drive our cars less. While we certainly need to find ways to use less oil and other fossil fuels, replacing ten percent of fossil fuels with biofuels won't do anything to make the world a cleaner, greener place. And above all, it won't reduce gridlock. It will simply create a false sense of security, and will fuel the desire to build more and bigger highways and keep on driving wastefully.

As James Howard Kunstler points out in The Long Emergency, the days of transporting our food and other goods long distances will stop by necessity. Prolonging this natural shift by a quick infusion of heavily subsidized biofuels won't prevent the end result. It will only prolong the time the human race stays in the fast lane on a crash course to environmental disaster. What we need is a new way of living on the planet.

When I was a child I spent a lot of time on my grandparent's 120-acre farm in southern Indiana. In the early days, they had a few pigs and a few chickens and they always grew most of their own vegetables. While they ultimately raised chickens for sale, their income never reflected the fact that for the most part, they were self-sustaining. Their daily lives were spent in the age old crafts of growing, preserving, and cooking the food they lived on.

This has been the way of life for the majority of people for the history of humanity. Only in the last few centuries have people been turned off the lands that fed them to be forced to cities to participate in an emerging consumer culture. Undoubtedly we need to reevaluate what we have lost and make plans to reinvent a less destructive way of living.

We need to promote small scale agricultural practices that nurture both humans and animals and that conserve the land and water. Studies have repeatedly shown that small organic farms are much more productive than the wasteland of petroleum based agribusiness food production systems we now call farming. We need to think in terms of food security.

Today the United States imports more food than it exports. We need to foster local food self-sufficiency and be prepared to share our excess with those in the world who because of drought and ill fortune, have no food. Indiana, with its wealth of prime farmland, is in a good position to do this. And we need to develop public transportation systems that won't destroy our state with more highways soon to be obsolete no matter what we do.

As David Korten writes in his book The Great Turning, we must come to measure our well being in terms of the health of our families, our communities and the natural environment. To do this, we need to challenge all policies that would continue the destructive status quo, and ask ourselves if any temporary advantage of a proposal is truly worth the long-range problems it might bring with it. We need to envision a new and healthier future. Large scale biofuel production is not the way there.

Jeanne Melchior is President of Protect Our Woods. She can be contacted at melchior@psci or via www.protectourwoods.org.