TANSTAAFL -- Ethanol Plants Impact Quality of Life

TANSTAAFL: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." As we seek solutions to economic problems, it's tempting to think we can find some magic solution that will make everything better. But we must remember that no solution will come without costs. Yesterday's Mitchell Daily Republic offers more evidence of the costs of ethanol, costs we don't see until it's too late. Residents in Loomis, a tiny town 10 miles north and west of Mitchell, complained to the Davison County Commission on Thursday of the noise pollution generated by the new Prairie Ethanol plant. Folks living near the new plant are losing sleep. One resident, Jay Ivers, backs his complaint with some science: using a dosimeter, he has measured noise levels from the ethanol plant reaching 58 to 63 decibels in his bedroom and 70 to 80 decibels in his yard. Perspective: normal conversation is 60 decibels; 80 decibels is a vacuum cleaner, heavy city traffic, or, according Ivers's own experiments, a rolling freight train passing 40 feet away.

Ivers gets my sympathy right away just for being scientific in his approach to the problem. As the father of a noisy, erratically sleeping infant, I further sympathize with his desire for a simple quiet night's sleep. A homeowner ought to be able to sleep peacefully in his own house without having to rearrange his life by moving his bedroom to the far end of the house or the basement, turning on appliances to drown out the noise, or installing expensive insulation. (A homeowner who loses sleep because of a noisy baby -- well, that's his own problem! :-) ). Ivers also wins my sympathy as he faces the typical corporate reaction: plant manager Dean Frederickson shrugs off the complaints, saying Ivers and his neighbors "have every right to say what they want, and I have a right to exist as a business as long as I'm legal, and I am legal and will continue to be legal." Don't expect good-neighborliness from corporations; all that matters to industry is the bottom line and the law (when the law works in their favor).

Ivers and his neighbors are victims of a classic example of externality, a cost of an economic transaction borne by individuals not party to that transaction. Prairie Ethanol gets to produce South Dakota's new liquid gold, which we are told will keep our family farms in business and promote energy independence to boot. To produce this valuable product, ethanol plants consume great quantities of energy and water, which they pay a fair market price for (cushioned, of course, by the ethanol production subsidy which the government gives not to the farmers producing the corn but to the big industrialists operating the ethanol plants). However, the ethanol plants also consume something for which they offer no compensation: the peace and quiet of country living. That quality of life is South Dakota's trump card in the competition for business. We can never outduel New York or San Francisco or even Minneapolis or Omaha for big-city shopping, transportation, or culture. But we can offer quiet country living, wide open spaces letting folks build their homes far away from the rush and roar of population and industry. That quality of life distinguishes South Dakota from the places we compete with for jobs... and that quality of life will erode as we buy into the promise of ethanol riches and crowd our landscape with ethanol plants. More prairie towns and farms will become uncomfortable, if not outright unlivable as the roar of the machinery, not to mention the glare of the factory lights (see the photo in the Daily Republic story) and the stench of grain alcohol (when the wind is right, I've smelled the Wentworth ethanol plant from Lake Herman, ten miles away).

Now I'm not ready to abandon ethanol as an alternative energy source. South Dakotans have to make a living, and the nation has to pursue alternative energy for its own economic and military secruity. However, we need to recognize all the costs that come with ethanol and balance them with all the benefits so glowingly promised by the big corporate interests and our own government. Higher corn prices? Great. More jobs? Keep 'em coming. But a quiet prairie night, a good night's sleep -- what are they worth to us?