THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 121

a 56 percent increase. 44 Grains and soybeans, which are in demand
for biofuels, saw particularly spectacular rises, both tripling over the
same period and more than doubling in the period's i nal year. 45 But
separating out cause from ef ect is devilishly dii cult, because many
forces af ect the price of food. At the same time that biofuels produc-
tion was rising, new land was being cultivated for food. Energy costs,
which are important to farming costs, also rose, while the U.S. dollar,
in which rising food prices are typically measured, fell. Speculative
interest in food commodities grew simultaneously, and several coun-
tries, responding to rising food prices, cut of exports, further fueling
price rises beyond their borders.
In 2008, a team at the International Monetary Fund dug through the
data. It estimated that a massive part of the price rise between 2002 and
2008 was due to biofuels production—as much as 70 percent in the
case of corn and 40 percent for soy. 46 Others, using dif erent models,
came to similar conclusions. Some analysts, emphasizing that most food
isn't corn, countered that the price impacts had to be far smaller. 47 But
rising corn prices can lit the cost of other crops, like rice, along with
them, as people abandon ever more expensive corn for cheaper food
and start planting corn instead of other crops on their available land.
Whatever the truth behind biofuels production and fuel prices,
though, the political consequences were clear. When Congress extended
the biofuels mandate in 2007, it drew a hard line: almost all of the gains
would have to come from fuels that did not compete for feedstock with
food. h e new mandate focused on these so-called advanced biofuels:
a total of twenty-one billion gallons of them were to be produced by
2022, equivalent to nearly a million barrels of oil every day. 48
h e target has been greeted with immense skepticism. h e law aimed
to yield 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2011. (Cellulosic
ethanol is a type of advanced biofuel that is critical to meeting the
goals set out in the law; it aims to make fuel from things like switch
grass and the cores of corn cobs that can't be used as food.) But only
six million gallons were ultimately produced, and few other near-term
gains appeared in sight. 49 In October 2011, at er extensive study, a blue-
ribbon panel of the National Academy of Sciences came to a stark con-
clusion: “Absent major technological innovation or policy changes, the