I first learned to think about ethanol as a fault line in conversations with my friend Joan Martinez Alier, a political ecologist. We met in 1987, drawn together by a shared question: how much energy really goes into producing our food once you count what nature and human labour truly cost?
My own interest was in the energetics of marine fisheries: the input-output balance of energy in that world. Ethanol was one of the clearest examples Alier used of that balance being falsified elsewhere.
Energetics involved converting everything – a litre of diesel, an hour of a fisherman’s labour, a kilogramme of fish – into the same currency: the calories, or kilocalories, of energy each one represents.
Simple bookkeeping can then be done: for every calorie that goes into fishing, how many calories of food come back out? When the return is high, the fishery is productive. When it costs more energy to catch the fish than what the fish give back as food, there is a deficit – even if the market still calls the catch a success.
When I met, Alier he was writing about Brazil, whose ethanol programme, Proálcool, was being celebrated by economists as a triumph of energy planning.
The programme, Alier pointed out, benefited...
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