By Richard Conniff, from the Fall 2007 issue of Environment: Yale magazine.

In the current rush to bioenergy as a remedy for global warming, hints of magic and madness are everywhere. Consider two instances:

Case One: In Arlington, Ariz., early this year, an electric power company and a biofuel startup captured carbon dioxide (CO2) exhaust from the stack of a power plant and piped it to a greenhouse, where it bubbled up through clear plastic bladders of water gone murky with algae. The algae used ordinary photosynthesis to convert the CO2 into more algae. And this crop got converted in turn into the elixir of our day, transportation-grade biodiesel and ethanol.

A number of attractive traits made algae, otherwise known as pond scum, suddenly look like green gold: It tolerates wastewater or brackish water. It can flourish in places, like the deserts of the American Southwest, where it doesn’t compete with food production. And it grows relentlessly, with little regard for season. Massachusetts based GreenFuel Technologies was predicting that its annual output would be on the order of 5,000 gallons of biofuel per acre – versus 360 gallons of ethanol (and perhaps as little as 60 gallons net, after accounting for fossil fuels used to produce it) from an acre of corn.

A company spokesperson conceded that the process faces hurdles. On the carbon accounting side, no one has yet addressed the extent to which algae from a coal-fired power plant qualifies as a biofuel. On the economic side, it would require 4,000 acres of greenhouses and other algaefarming infrastructure to handle the CO2 from a single 1,000-megawatt coal power plant. But the company figures that there are 1,700 such plants in the United States with that kind of acreage nearby. That sounded promising enough that venture capitalists have recently bet about $40 million, according to New Energy Finance, a British research firm, on a dozen startups racing to bring algae biofuels to market.

Case Two: In January 2007, Indonesia signed agreements worth $12.4 billion to supply biofuel to international partners. On the face of it, these deals sounded good too: over its entire life cycle, by one calculation, biodiesel from oil palm trees generates less than half the carbon dioxide produced by conventional gasoline, and it’s renewable. But to make room for new biofuel plantations, Indonesia committed itself to opening up 2.5 million acres of land this year alone, with more than 16 million acres – roughly five times the area of Connecticut – in biofuel production by 2010.

Most of it will come from cutting and clearing rainforests in a nation that already leads the world in deforestation, according to Lisa Curran, professor of tropical resources and the John Musser director of the Tropical Resources Institute at F&ES. Despite its undeveloped economy, Indonesia also ranks third in the world, behind China and the United States, as a source of greenhouse gas emissions – almost all from the burning of rainforests and the deep underlying deposits of peat that get exposed and dried out when the forest is stripped away. A consultant for Wetlands International calculated that, when you factor in the loss of peat, which is a fossil fuel, greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm biodiesel are “up to eight times worse” than those from coal or oil.

And the story only gets worse from there. The same day that Indonesia was announcing its biofuel deal, a United Nations report, “The Last Stand of the Orangutan,” estimated that 98 percent of forests in Malaysia and Indonesia will be destroyed over the next 15 years because of logging and oil palm plantations. One of the most diverse habitats on Earth is being replaced, said a Conservation International biologist, “with a West African palm and a few commensal species of birds and rats” living in an “ecological desert.”

But what might have been the coup de grâce came from the Australian Orangutan Project, an environmental group, which charged that the pursuit of ostensibly greener fuels was a direct cause of death of endangered apes. It said that 5,000 orangutans were already being killed annually – many of them on oil palm plantations, where managers pay a $20-a-head bounty to eliminate them as a nuisance. Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak dismissed the orangutan accusation as an attempt “to hurt the interest of the oil palm industry,” which Malaysian companies largely control. In Europe, where oil palm biodiesel is part of an ambitious plan to cut dependence on fossil fuels, outraged environmentalists pushed for a ban on tainted imports.

Bioenergy is widely regarded as the only sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. (A note about usage: Though the term biofuel is more familiar, it usually refers only to renewable fuels for transport. The broader term bioenergy adds in fuels for heating, cooling and power generation. Both come from biomass, meaning trees, agricultural crops, manures, landfill methane and some household and manufacturing waste.) Conventional thinking says that if we can figure out how to get enough energy from the products of the living world, then we can bring our energy consumption back into the natural cycle, with carbon being continuously released and recaptured by current plant growth. That would avoid the main problem with fossil fuels, which overwhelm the Earth’s capacity for recapture by releasing in a single year the carbon stored away by hundreds of thousands of years of crops. The new “bioeconomy” could also create jobs and profits from forest, farm and manufacturing byproducts. With careful planning, some researchers suggest, it could even benefit wildlife, by encouraging landowners to plant and manage marginal farmland, forests and other habitat for both biodiversity and bioenergy.

But it has also become evident that there are more ways to do bioenergy badly than most people ever imagined, with consequences that include destruction of rainforests, loss of wildlife, devastation of local communities and painful increases in worldwide food prices. That became clear early this year, when tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Mexico City to protest rising prices for corn tortillas, a staple food. (The price increase was generally attributed to competition for the crop from the ethanol market, but some critics also charged tortilla manufacturers with price gouging to exploit the shifting market.) The food-fuel trade-off is also causing “agflation” in the United States, where 40 percent of the corn crop is expected to go to the ethanol market over the next few years, up from 20 percent now. American farmers have planted about 90 million acres of corn this year, more than in any year since World War II. But some observers, including the chief executive of agribusiness giant Cargill, have warned of further food price shocks and even shortages. So much agricultural land has been shifted to corn that even the breadbasket state of Iowa is increasingly dependent on food imports.

These rapid changes have raised troubling questions about the sustainability of the bioenergy movement. “There is a major role for biofuel to play,” said John Sheehan of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “But when people get the idea that it’s a panacea, they are sadly mistaken.” Getting it right depends on crucial nuances. But the nuances often seem to get trampled underfoot in what some observers have described as a “gold rush,” a “bubble,” a “boondoggle” and even a “swindle.”

Two assumptions have been feeding the infectious zeal for bioenergy, appealing simultaneously to both ends of the political spectrum. The first is that we can stop or slow global warming – and still drive our cars – if we just switch from fossil fuels to green fuels. The second is that bioenergy can free us from dependence on costly fossil fuels controlled by profit-hungry multinational companies and foreign cartels.

“If we used 100 percent of U.S. corn, it would still replace only 7 percent of total petroleum use.” David Pimental

Most researchers regard both assumptions as seriously flawed. “If we used 100 percent of U.S. corn, it would still replace only 7 percent of total petroleum use,” said David Pimental, a Cornell University entomologist who is a longtime bioenergy critic. Sheehan added: “Nobody is in a position to say they can unilaterally do what we do with petroleum.” Pretending that bioenergy alone is the key “is hurting the public debate and keeping people from coming to a real understanding.”

Even so, these assumptions, and the generous government subsidies that go with them, are tantalizing for entrepreneurs, who suddenly see new sources of bioenergy everywhere. It isn’t just the obvious stuff like corn or restaurant cooking oil: proponents are busy trying to get bioenergy from turkey manure in Minnesota, from brewery wastewater in Australia, from substandard coffee beans in Brazil and from coconuts on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. At times, this enthusiasm brings to mind the scientist in Gulliver’s Travels, who “had been eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun- Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers.” But the bioenergy boom is different from Swift’s satire in at least one crucial respect: nobody wants to spend that much time on research. With the lure of “energy independence” in mind, President Bush set a national goal of producing 35 billion gallons of biofuel annually by 2017, a target Sheehan described as “frighteningly aggressive.” Aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the European Union announced a plan to meet 10 percent of its road transport needs with biofuel by 2020, up from 1 percent today.

Biomass is of course the oldest human energy source, in the form of fires fueled by wood. But researchers have been pointing out for decades that no product is automatically greener just because the raw material comes from nature and the process is ancient. It depends on which plants you grow, how you grow them and whether you give them a chance to grow back, among other variables. For the past five years, for instance, Robert Bailis, assistant professor of environmental social science at F&ES, has studied the charcoal trade around the town of Narok in southwestern Kenya. Communal land there is now being privatized and converted to commercial farming, between the Mau Mountains and the Masai Mara Game Reserve, one of the most important wildlife areas in the world. It’s a dry landscape, dusty savanna with open-canopy woodlands. “The first thing you need to do for agriculture is clear off the trees,” said Bailis, who studies the human dimension of energy use in developing countries. But clear-cutting with machinery requires capital. So the new landowners typically invite the charcoal cutters to do the work and, in exchange, let them use the wood as feedstock for their trade.

Charcoal has become the chief object of a complex biofuel subeconomy, connecting Narok to Nairobi. After being cut, according to Bailis, the wood gets stacked in chest-high mounds for burning down into charcoal. (People in the city prefer charcoal to wood as a household fuel, because it’s more compact and less smoky.) Then it gets packed into 80- pound seed bags and trucked to the city, where large retailers buy it for sale directly to the public or through middlemen on bicycles or donkey carts who buy a bag or two and break it down into small pails, called debe. Some poor urban families can afford to buy only enough charcoal for a meal or two. So retailers break it down yet again into containers the size of a margarine tub, called nkebe.

The bulk of the profit goes not to the people who actually conduct the trade, said Bailis, but to officials who take bribes to look the other way. This is a little baffling: Regulation of the charcoal trade was intended not for Narok but for the Mau Mountains, where the upland forests are essential for holding onto rainfall and preventing erosion. But the Mau forest continues to be stripped away by charcoal poachers and by agricultural settlements opened up as political favors. Meanwhile, the perfectly legal charcoal merchants in Narok pay their bribes. The trade is doubly baffling, according to Bailis, because converting such marginal land to wheat farming is likely to yield only a modest profit at best, and none at all during the frequent droughts. The charcoal cutters and farmers are displacing the wildlife that makes the Masai Mara Kenya’s top tourist attraction. And tourism is the country’s leading source of hard currency.

Bailis hopes next to launch a pilot project to see if the charcoal trade, Kenya’s top energy source ahead of oil and coal, can be conducted on a sustainable basis. The woodlands around Narok are resilient and might be economically viable with a combination of selective cutting and livestock grazing. Kenya also has other biofuel options, including a large sugar cane industry, with the potential for exploiting waste products to make ethanol. But a previous stab at the business in the 1980s failed, said Bailis, largely for political reasons.

Federal policy and business investment alike have “been in this rush to biofuels, as if all biofuels
were created equal.” Daniel Kammen

The incipient Jatropha industry, based on an oil-rich shrub from India, also seems promising. It’s a good source of biodiesel, grows on marginal land with minimal rainfall and requires relatively little care. Like coffee, it’s also suitable for cultivation by smallholders. And those qualities encourage people “to put more and more expectations on it – the potential of Jatropha for poverty alleviation, the potential of Jatropha for empowerment of women,” said Bailis. “There’s a lot of pressure on this little plant.”

But the likelihood is that Jatropha will prove more economical in large-scale production. “That’s not to say the smallholder model, with poverty alleviation, wouldn’t work. It’s just that other models might work better,” said Bailis. So unless regulations are in place and enforced, Jatropha is liable to cause social disruption in Kenya. It won’t lead to the sort of large-scale land conversion now occurring in Indonesia, according to Bailis. But Jatropha could take over productive farmland, putting competitive pressure on Kenya’s food supply and thus aggravating poverty instead of alleviating it.

Baffling is also the word that comes to mind to describe the indiscriminate enthusiasm for bioenergy in the United States, which now has the largest biofuel program in the world. Federal policy and business investment alike have “been in this rush to biofuels, as if all biofuels were created equal,” said Daniel Kammen, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Kammen coauthored a 2006 paper in Science comparing greenhouse gas emissions for different forms of bioenergy, which showed, he said, “that they are dramatically not equal. You could make ethanol from corn in a plant operated by coal, and that fuel is actually worse for the environment than gasoline. But if you make ethanol from cellulosic municipal waste in a plant run by natural gas or, even better, wind power, that’s orders of magnitude better than gasoline. But federal policy doesn’t distinguish along those lines. So it’s sending industry the wrong signals. It’s saying, ‘Invest quickly in biofuels to get in on the game. We don’t really care which biofuels. In fact we’re biased toward corn because of the incredible subsidies.’” One result is that new corn ethanol refineries tend to rely on coal, because natural gas and other clean
power sources are more expensive.

The first official effort to take account of the real differences among biofuels became law in California in January 2007. Rather than blindly embracing the biofuel label, the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard requires that the total carbon content per gallon of fuel, regardless of type, must decline by 10 percent by 2020. “This low-carbon metric says we’re going to judge all fuels based on their merit, and that message needs to escalate up to the federal level pretty fast,” said Kammen. (Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have already endorsed similar plans.) An international panel, the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, organized by Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Energy Center, is also developing standards for environmentally and socially sustainable biofuels, with a first draft due in 2008. Without such standards, critics say the pursuit of ostensibly “greener” fuels may just aggravate existing environmental problems. This year alone, U.S. farmers planted an additional 9 million acres of corn to meet demand from the ethanol market. But “corn causes more soil erosion than any other crop in the United States,” said Cornell’s Pimental. “Corn production uses more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop, and the leachings go down the Mississippi and cause the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Corn also uses more insecticides and herbicides than any other crop in the United States.” Some of this year’s extra acreage came from growing corn on the same land two years in a row, skipping the normal rotation to soybeans. But soybeans fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, and corn doesn’t. So without that boost, farmers will need to use even more nitrogen fertilizer next year.

Pimental also sees danger in the effort to shift from the cob to the stalk as the raw material for ethanol production. At least in theory, using the stover – the dried stalks and leaves of a cereal crop – would reduce pressure on the food supply and extract more product from the same inputs. But much of that “waste” material now gets chopped up and plowed back into the soil. Losing it would be “a disaster for agriculture,” said Pimental. “We’re already losing soil at 10 times the sustainability
rate on agricultural land generally.”

Ethanol from stover is an example of cellulosic bioenergy, which many analysts now regard as the best hope for sustainably replacing fossil fuels. Cellulosic biofuels come from the tough, fibrous material that makes up 75 to 85 percent of most plants – not just corn, but also nonfood plants. The likely sources include wood chips, for instance, and the sludge from paper manufacturing, which now goes to landfills at a cost of $80 a ton. Thus cellulosic biomass has the potential to provide energy without driving up food prices. It could even help feed Third World farm families, Berkeley’s Kammen suggested, by providing a market for waste material from the sweet sorghum that is widely grown as a staple food in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the United States, some cellulosic bioenergy crops, particularly native perennials like switchgrass, can grow well on marginal land, without pesticides or fertilizers, and also provide habitat for wildlife.

Iogen, a Canadian company, has built a cellulosic ethanol plant for wheat, oat and barley straw in Ottawa, Ontario. Colorado-based Range Fuels is building a plant in Georgia, using wood chips as a feedstock. But the technology is still experimental. Whereas corn kernels contain simple sugars that are easily fermented, it’s harder to break down the complex carbohydrates in cellulose and hemicellulose. Some researchers expect that it will be years before cellulosic ethanol can compete economically with gasoline or corn ethanol. Others say the potential payoff could make that happen much sooner: The real attraction of cellulosic bioenergy is that it produces just 20 percent of the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted from gasoline, while corn ethanol produces, at best, 70 percent of greenhouse gases. That’s partly because the manufacturing process uses lignin, the woody material in the plant, instead of coal or oil, to provide heat for fermentation.

But even if cellulosic bioenergy becomes a practical reality, it will still run up against a fundamental barrier: there simply isn’t enough land – or sea – to grow our way out of the global warming crisis. Most studies, while endorsing the importance of bioenergy, project that it will require vast acreage and supply only a portion of likely energy demand. For instance, a 2004 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report, “Growing Energy: How Biofuels Can Help End America’s Oil Dependence,” said it could take 114 million acres of switchgrass to produce about 56 percent of the projected fuel demand for cars and trucks in the United States in 2050. A study from the University of Tennessee said the United States will need 50 to 100 million acres of “dedicated energy crops like switchgrass” to supply 25 percent of the nation’s total energy use by 2025. Either way, these are big numbers; the United States currently has only about 800 million acres available for cultivation for food and all other nonforest purposes.

Thus researchers routinely note that bioenergy makes sense only as part of a broader attack on the causes of global warming. In its “Growing Energy” report, for instance, the NRDC argued that the remedies must include “smart growth” provisions to avoid the sort of sprawling development that wastes energy, and a dramatic improvement in vehicle efficiency, to an average of 50 miles per gallon. Together, those two measures could reduce the likely U.S. demand for gasoline in 2050 from 290 billion gallons a year, with business as usual, to just 108 billion gallons. Combining those measures with use of cellulosic biofuel could bring gasoline demand down even further, to about 6 billion gallons a year. This fits with a widespread sense that supply-side remedies, like bioenergy, can provide about a third of the solution in the transport sector. But another two-thirds of the solution still needs to come from the demand side, through conservation and efficiency improvements. The second part of the equation tends to get forgotten amid the bioenergy hoopla.

“Two really important messages are getting lost in the rush to sexy and seemingly simple solutions like biofuels,” said Nathanael Greene, principal author of the NRDC report. “The first is the paramount importance of improving our energy efficiency as much as possible. The second is that biofuels, while seemingly simple, are incredibly hard to do right. And how we do them makes all the difference in whether they are good for the environment or bad for the environment.”

Few people see the consequences of that as clearly as Lisa Curran. Since the 1980s, her research has repeatedly taken her to the area around Gunung Palung National Park in the West Kalimantan province of Borneo. She has seen most of the buffer zone around the park, and some of the park itself, cut down by loggers over the past two decades. But the development of oil palm plantations, first for edible oil, and recently for biodiesel, has proved more devastating.

“I thought logging was bad,” Curran said last spring in New Haven, between visits to Borneo. “But it was nothing like this. It’s a moonscape. They’re clearing and burning and putting in an exotic plant, and not even leaving patches of forest. I had a student come in, and she said, ‘I came to Borneo and I didn’t see an animal or a tree the whole summer. Just a sea of oil palm.’”

Curran is studying the effects of this dramatic change on global warming and on local environmental justice across 60 affected villages. In the rush to biodiesel from palm oil, said Curran, the bulldozers often simply show up, and small communities or even individual smallholders find themselves negotiating one-on-one with multinational corporations. “Each time I go back, there are three more companies clearing and bulldozing and negotiating.” Local people often want palm oil to come to their village because the plantations hold out the promise of income. But “the vulnerability and risk to these communities are enormous,” said Curran. “Prices shift or companies decide that this isn’t as profitable as they thought. …” Even when things go well, the locals often end up as “indentured servants” or worse on what used to be their own land. On a recent visit, Curran suddenly realized that many of the field workers had been shipped in from mainland China, depriving the locals of even the $2.50 daily wage for plantation work.

Accurately quantifying the globalwarming effects of the rush to biodiesel is difficult, according to Curran, even with the help of satellite imagery, detailed measurements of the carbon in peat and other data. The numbers depend on whether a particular plantation is producing edible oil or biodiesel, obviously, but also on whether the planting takes place on degraded land or on freshly cleared forest. Where there’s peat, the question becomes “Was the land cleared and burned? Or was it cleared and burned and drained?” Extrapolating samples across broad areas can be tricky, because there are so many variables.

“Everybody in the environmental community says oil palm is bad, but it’s a little more complicated than that,” said Curran. From an agricultural perspective, this West African palm can be a “miracle” plant, with “huge yields,” a broad range of uses in foods and a high efficiency rate for conversion into biodiesel. But as with every other form of bioenergy, it depends on where and how you grow the stuff. Curran’s research has demonstrated that about 60 percent of the new plantations are on freshly cleared forestland. Setting aside the environmental issues, the decision to exploit forested land could ultimately jeopardize the agricultural investment – and the displaced villagers – as potential customers in Europe and elsewhere begin to look more carefully at whether a particular biofuel is part of the solution or just another cause of the problem.

About 20 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions produced worldwide by human activity now comes from the clearing and burning of tropical forests, according to an article co-authored by Curran in a recent issue of Science. If unchecked, this practice will release about 100 billion tons of such emissions during the rest of this century, equivalent to about 10 years of fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. Borneo is already a disproportionately large part of the problem because of its vast peat deposits. “Peat matters,” said Curran. “Forest type matters. Burning one hectare of peat can be 20 times worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than a hectare of Amazonian rainforest.”

In their Science article, Curran and her co-authors calculated that one of the least expensive ways to address global warming would be to slow the worldwide rate of deforestation. The article didn’t analyze how costly or effective this would be compared with bioenergy development. But it was hard to avoid the conclusion that attempting to fix global warming by cutting down rainforests to make room for bioenergy plantations is a form of lunacy. According to Curran and her co-authors, slowing the rate of deforestation by half, between now and 2050, would avoid the equivalent of six years of fossil fuel emissions, and it would provide up to 12 percent of the total greenhouse gas reductions needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Those numbers suggest that bioenergy development and reduced deforestation need to happen at the same time.

And that means that some form of compensation needs to be in place, so that a piece of intact forest has a cash value at least equal to what it would be worth if cleared and converted into a bioenergy plantation. A variety of complications caused nations that signed the Kyoto Protocol not to use payments for “avoided deforestation” as a way to offset fossil fuel emissions. But at the instigation of some developing nations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is now considering a change in that policy. Technological developments have also made it more practical to keep track of land changes in remote tropical forests and to accurately calculate how they affect the carbon balance.

Slowing the rate of deforestation by half, between now and 2050, would avoid the equivalent of six years of fossil fuel emissions.

So it’s rapidly become worthwhile for wealthier nations, businesses or even individuals to pay landowners who maintain their forests an annual “rent” for the carbon thereby kept out of the atmosphere. Political and economic questions still need to be resolved – particularly how to apportion rent between governments of forest-rich nations and the local populations responsible for maintaining a particular forest. It’s also not clear, at least in the current market, that the “rent-a-rainforest” idea can compete with bioenergy. It depends, among other factors, on the price of carbon and the type of forest, according to Brent Sohngen ’96, an agriculture professor at Ohio State University. He included the rental approach as one of the most costeffective ways to address global warming in an analysis written with Robert Mendelsohn, Ph.D. ’78, Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy at F&ES, titled “A Sensitivity Analysis of Forest Carbon Sequestration,” delivered at a 2004 energy modeling forum. Prices in the European emissions trading market are highly volatile. But if carbon were trading at, say, $20 a ton, Sohngen figures the annual emissions trading value of keeping a hectare of South American rainforest intact would justify a rent of about $120 a year. That might not be good enough, given that growing soybeans on the same land could yield $150 to $200 a year.

On the other hand, paying rent to keep a forest in Borneo intact could make immediate sense, on both sides of the transaction. Oil palm can be even more lucrative than soybeans. But the enormous quantity of carbon stored in the peat could justify a much higher global warming rent.

The idea of renting a rainforest may seem far-fetched. But in the 1990s a “payment for environmental services” program succeeded in stopping deforestation in Costa Rica. A similar program also exists in the United States, where farmers receive annual payments through the USDA Conservation Reserve Program for setting aside sensitive or degraded lands. The program covers 36 million acres at an annual cost of $1.8 billion, and produces an estimated $500 million a year in benefits from reduced erosion and $737 million from wildlife viewing and hunting. No one has yet calculated the value of the carbon being sequestered or the biofuel being produced by keeping that land out of annual crop production.

Ideally, that kind of program could adjust to accommodate bioenergy demand, according to John Sheehan, of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Farmers could plant native grasses to harvest for cellulosic ethanol, and still receive a reduced rent from the Conservation Reserve Program for erosion control and biodiversity benefits.

Unfortunately, nothing that rational seems likely to happen anytime soon. In the heedless rush to produce bioenergy, from Iowa to Kenya to Borneo, hardly anyone is ready to stop just yet and ask, “Is this really good for the environment?” Or even, “Is it a bubble?” In a year or two, the whole thing could come crashing down in dust. But for now, farmers with dollar signs in their eyes are beginning to pull their land out of the Conservation Reserve Program – and plant it in corn for ethanol.