Business Week’s Ed Wallace:
[T]here was already a nearly 9,000-square-mile Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We weren’t aware that it was caused in large part by the massive amount of fertilizer runoff from farms across our Midwest, fed into local rivers and tributaries, and carried by the Mississippi out into the Gulf.
President Obama stated that this disaster has again taught us that we need to move more quickly to alternative energy. Apparently he was not aware of a study published in last October’s Environmental Science & Technology, which showed that the current mandate to increase ethanol production to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022 has the potential to increase the size of the Gulf’s Dead Zone substantially. More ethanol, the study concluded, would mean using even more fertilizers for biofuels crops such as corn, soy, switchgrass, and stover.
Then again, there’s a reason you know everything about the current BP disaster and so little about the Gulf’s quarter-century-old Dead Zone. It’s easy to film oil balls and plumes, animals covered in oil, and empty beaches for the nightly news stories, but water that’s hypoxic and devoid of oxygen just looks like water on your HDTV.
Yeah; hard data is pretty unsexy.
h/t: Michael E. Duffy, via his FB feed
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