The
Oshkosh Northwestern editorized on the Sparta ethanol plant described in the post below:
Long has Sparta been home to a great bicycling and hiking trail, known as the birthplace of a NASA Mercury and Space Shuttle astronaut and site of some of Wisconsin's most bucolic countryside.
It's now becoming known another Wisconsin "city where that ethanol plant wants to build."
The debate currently rocking Sparta is one more example of how Wisconsin keeps losing focus in the ethanol debate.
Too many communities are, as Sparta is, focusing on phantom plant odors, trucks, dust and noise -- appealing to base fears and not probing the tougher, long-range questions: "Is ethanol from corn a truly viable future energy source?" "Are corn and ethanol subsidies justified?"
In Sparta, investors are proposing a $115 million ethanol plant next door to a dairy-based foods plant, a subsidiary of Hormel Foods Corp., according to Associated Press accounts. The Hormel plant employs 350 people. It requires ventilation. And, the plant's officials contend, if an ethanol plant moves in next door, invading ethanol-production odors will taint the dairy products, AP reports.
So, the Hormel operation – it operates within a half-mile of the proposed ethanol plant site -- is threatening to leave Sparta and take its jobs with it. That's the new twist in an otherwise tired debate getting caught up in panic, myth and hysteria as a new development works its way through a typical municipal and county zoning gauntlet.
Plant investors aren't backing down. There's a group in opposition to the new plant called "Friends of Sparta." Scientists, "experts" and lawyers are chiming in here and there, too.
Any of this sound familiar, Oshkosh?
The specifics were a tad different, but the fear-mongering was, largely, the same in Oshkosh five years ago. And, largely speaking, there was little discussion of the long-term future and viability of ethanol as energy source.
Instead, property owners got in an uproar over odors.
It's five years later. If rural Oshkosh residents do have complaints about smells and noises emanating from Utica Energy, they seem to be being addressed rather quietly.
So, some advice to our friends in Sparta and to the whole of Wisconsin (sure to see more ethanol-plant debates flare up in the years ahead): Rest assured, something will "stink" in these small-town, land-use battles unless cooler heads and legit scientists are heard. It isn't ethanol plants that leave us gasping for air. It's tired Not In My Back Yard arguments.
Final Thought: If we're going to debate ethanol plants, let's ditch the nonsense over abhorrent odors and landscape-marring operations. Let's lock horns over and fully debate the long-term sustainability, subsidization and job-creation of an alternative energy source.
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