We’ve been hearing about rising car insurance rates for a while now, but while it’s easy to blame corporate greed for the increases, some of the blame lies in the fact that insurance claims have become significantly more severe over the past four years. LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ recent study found that the costs for bodily injury and property damage claims have climbed steadily in recent times, contributing to the rise in premiums.

Since 2020, claims for bodily injury have risen in severity by 20 percent, while material damages coverage increased 47 percent. Parts and labor shortages contributed, as did increases in the costs of medical care. As LexisNexis pointed out, the more severe accidents have raised questions about minimum coverage limits and whether they are adequate to cover the increased costs.

There are 43 states plus Washington, D.C., that require $25,000 or less in coverage, while four states have $30,000 minimum coverage limits. Three others have minimums of $50,000, barely covering the average new vehicle price in the United States.

Total loss claims have increased 29 percent since 2020, and over a quarter of collisions in 2023 resulted in totaled vehicles. These claims are more expensive for the insurer and can be customer service headaches for drivers. Almost half of the people surveyed said they were dissatisfied with their experience following a total-loss accident, and 40 percent said it took a month or longer to receive payment for their claim.

Another factor contributing to the severity of claims is the fact that a greater number of people are getting legal help from an attorney. A majority of study respondents – 85 percent – said an attorney had approached them after an accident. Around 60 percent had been contacted by two or more lawyers, and more than half of the people who obtained legal help received more money from their settlements.

Independence Day is about fireworks, parades and picnics, sure, but there’s another reality — and it’s a sad counterpoint to what’s supposed to be a celebration of freedom. The Fourth of July is the deadliest summer holiday on the roads.

This is partly because the holiday is pegged to a specific date. Though it can come on a weekend or be weekend adjacent, some years it falls midweek, on Thursday in 2024 for example. You don’t always get a long weekend like Labor Day or Memorial Day, so driving travel can be more concentrated, sometimes even down to the one day. A lot of drinking and other bad decisions can be concentrated on that day too. And more than those other holidays, Fourth of July events coast-to-coast bring out huge crowds. 

The folks at the Jerry insurance app took a hard look at NHTSA crash data along with Census Bureau info and came up with some numbers and charts that you might find sobering (literally) this Fourth, when a record 60.6 million Americans are expected to be traveling: 

• There has been an average total of 429 fatal crashes nationwide on the Fourth of July each year between 2016-2022. That’s up 17% from the average in 2008-2015.
• There were nearly 500 deaths by impaired drivers over a Fourth holiday weekend in 2022.
• Nearly half the crashes, 47%, involved some combination of speeding, drinking and drugs. A third, 31%, involved speeding; a third, 32%, involved at least one driver under the influence of alcohol; and another 12% involved drugs. 
• Three-quarters (73%) of car-crash fatalities on the Fourth are male. The majority had been drinking.
• Over half (52%) of those killed in crashes are under 40 years old. Two-thirds (66%) of the deaths in that age group were in drinking-related crashes.
• There’s a huge time-of-day uptick for deadly crashes, happening between 9 p.m. and midnight as people drive home from parties and fireworks shows. There’s another uptick after 1 a.m. when you add bar closings to that.
• In some cities and states, the carnage is worse than others. Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit have the most fatal crashes, likewise California, Texas and Florida, which is not surprising given their size. (California alone registered three times as many fatal crashes as New York).
• But when measured per capita, Detroit, Memphis and Kansas City are the worst. Also Montana and the Dakotas, perhaps because of greater distances driven. 
• And the problem is not just cars — Mothers Against Drunk Driving points out that boating fatalities involving alcohol are also a big problem over the Fourth. The U.S. Coast Guard concurs that the effects of alcohol on judgment and reaction times are greatly amplified on the water.

To address the problem of young people drinking on the Fourth, MADD recommends using strategies from the Power of Parents Handbook, saying a five-year study concluded that the book helps teens become more likely to decline rides from impaired drivers and less likely to drive when impaired themselves. 

The Jerry app’s report features a dozen revealing charts. We’ve included two of them here, but for a deeper dive, you should check out the full report.

On the Fourth, fireworks aren’t the only risk. Have a safe and sane one.

Last week, Reuters reported that “Oil and corn groups team up against Biden’s tailpipe emissions rules.” Presidential elections always restore corn to the headlines because corn is such enormous business that the tall grass should be called “Gold on the Cob.” That’s not just gold for farmers, either, thanks to corn’s requirements and reach. Industrial farming companies like Cargill, chemical companies like DuPont and Monsanto, and ethanol refiners like Poet Biorefining and Archer Daniels Midland all derive massive benefit from the amazing maize.

The corn lobby has a touchy relationship with Big Oil. When the Associated Press published “The Secret, Dirty Cost of Obama’s Green Power Push” in 2013 (highly recommended read), we’re told, “An industry blog in Minnesota said the AP had succumbed ‘to Big Oil’s deep pockets and powerful influence.'”

As governments have taken more steps to enact regulations aiming to curb greenhouse gasses, though, corn finds common cause with oil. Mandated reductions in traditional fuel usage threaten refiner profits, and less fuel used — or no liquid fuel, at least directly, in the case of electric vehicles — means less ethanol added, reducing ethanol purchases and subsidies distributed along the value chain. Various lawsuits filed against the EPA in the past few weeks represent the combined forces of the American Petroleum Institute, National Corn Growers Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, Renewable Fuels Association and National Farmers Union.

It’s a topic so big it could come up in tonight’s presidential debate (CNN and other channels, 9 p.m. Eastern). The higher fuel economy standards are an initiative of President Biden’s administration (he made a case for ethanol in 2022 in a speech inside a Poet Biofuels building); former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, complains about EVs every chance he gets. The big business of corn is one reason why. 

RFA President and CEO Geoff Cooper summed up the problem for the ethanol lobby with, “[The] EPA grossly exceeded its statutory authority by finalizing regulations that effectively mandate the production of EVs, while blatantly excluding the ability of flex fuel vehicles and low-carbon, high-octane renewable fuels like ethanol to achieve significant vehicle emissions reductions.”

Using ethanol to power cars and reformulate gasoline isn’t new. Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T could run on ethanol because gasoline wasn’t the commodity it is today. Refiners began mixing ethanol into gasoline in the 1920s to get higher octane ratings, which reduced knock (lead was a much more famous octane enhancer). And ethanol use spiked during World War II when gas supplies were diverted to the U.S. military.

The Calgren Renewable Fuels ethanol plant in Pixley, Calif. (AP)

The upsides

Ethanol subsidies aren’t new. They began in the U.S. with the Energy Policy Act of 1978, and remained in effect as either a subsidy and/or tax credit until the end of the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit in 2011, by which time the system was said to cost the government more than $5 billion per year. Well, the payouts didn’t end, really, the government simply created new methods of providing incentives, grants, loan guarantees, production payments and tax credits.  

Leaning on ethanol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions isn’t new, either. The 1990 Clean Air Act required more oxygenated gasoline in areas of the country with elevated ground-level ozone measurements. Increased oxygenate helps gasoline burn more completely during combustion, reducing the amount of carbon monoxide, soot, and environmentally harmful compounds that escape from a vehicle’s tailpipe.

Ethanol and MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) became popular oxygenates. As researchers began to question MTBE’s ability to break down in water, though, ethanol — an organic resource — found more favor. As some states began declaring MTBE unwelcome beginning in 2000, the U.S. government’s 2003 Energy Bill declared ethanol the only legal fuel oxygenate for the U.S. market.

That established a federally guaranteed market for ethanol for the first time (as opposed to refiners having a choice in oxygenate). Ethanol doesn’t need to be made with corn — sorghum is another option — but renewable fuel in the U.S. today is effectively corn-based.

Two years after that energy bill, the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 exploded ethanol’s guaranteed market. The RFS instructs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to decide on a minimum volume of renewable fuels to be included in the nation’s fossil fuel supply every year. The volumes, called Renewable Volume Obligations (RVO), change based on government agency predictions of fuel usage. The renewables take four forms: Conventional biofuel (also called renewable fuel in EPA parlance); biomass-based diesel; “other advanced biofuel;” and cellulosic biofuel.

Big crop, big business

U.S. Department of Agriculture tables on U.S. Bioenergy Statistics show the effects all this legislation has had on corn production. In the first quarter of 1986, 3.5% of corn production by bushel went to fuel alcohol use. That percentage crossed into double digits for the first time in Q3 of 2002, when 11.9% of corn production went to fuel alcohol use.

From December 2022 to February 2023, 35.7% of U.S. corn production went to make ethanol. Another table in the Bioenergy Statics spreadsheet shows that for the full year of 2023, 5.3 billion bushels of corn went to ethanol production.

Sorghum maxed out at 131 million bushels used for ethanol back in 2016; for the past two years, there’s no data for sorghum.

All that corn got plugged into satisfying the EPA’s “renewable volume obligation” for the nation’s fuel supply; in 2023, that was 20.82 billion gallons of renewable fuel poured into the 143 billion gallons of gas American drivers chugged through last year. The RVO for 2024 is 21.81 billion gallons or 13.55% of the nation’s predicted fuel usage. In 2025, the RVO will be 22.68 billion gallons or 13.05%.

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So it is that corn is America’s largest agricultural commodity crop and the U.S. is the world’s largest corn grower, and it’s not even close.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that in 2023, farmers grew a record 15.3 billion bushels of corn on 86.5 million acres of land, compared to just 4.16 billion bushels of soybeans, the second-biggest crop, on 82.4 million acres. Add the yields for soybeans, grain, rice and cotton, and they don’t come close to half of last year’s corn crop.

Only 1% of corn grown is the sweet corn we eat at meals. The rest, often called field corn or dent corn, is used for products like corn meal, high fructose corn syrup and plastics. But on average, roughly 40% of field corn ends up at the pumps.

It’s tough to find subsidy amounts the government pays to farmers for corn production not strictly related to ethanol. USA Facts data claims that in 2016, corn farmers received $2.2 billion in government subsidies, beating the individual amounts disbursed for soybeans, sugar, cotton, wheat, oranges, livestock, hay and forage, and “all others.”

On top of this, a giant export market that the government continues to fight to expand gives corn growers a ton of power that can turn into additional government payments.

So when you hear about farmers going on a date to Washington, D.C., with The Seven Sisters to challenge some EPA action, these are the numbers compelling the union.

The downsides

And none of this gets into the underside of the issue, the, let’s say, debatable aspects about corn-based ethanol: The tradeoff for lower vehicle emissions being what some believe are horrific environmental consequences. The same way high gas prices made shale oil and fracking good business propositions, the RFS encouraged farmers to plant corn in places historically considered unwelcome, tilling huge amounts of virgin prairie and conserved land in the process.

Tilling that land is said to have unlocked enough carbon dioxide that it would take two decades for the planted field to absorb it. The enormous water needs to grow corn are blamed for lowering water tables. Excessive use of nitrogen fertilizers to maximize yields sucks oxygen from the soil and water, leading to dead zones in waterways, including an enormous zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2021, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measured the Gulf’s dead zone at roughly 6,334 square miles, larger than the average dead zone for the previous five years of 5,380 square miles. That’s an area larger than the state of Connecticut, hovering mostly off the coast of America’s second-largest seafood producing state, Louisiana.

And even before all of that, the founding presumptions of the RFS have been questioned since the beginning. Many suspect corn-based ethanol can’t be made to work with the Renewable Fuels Standard without some creative numbers.

The RFS stipulates that “Renewable fuel (or conventional biofuel) typically refers to ethanol derived from corn starch and must meet a 20% lifecycle GHG [greenhouse gas] reduction,” meaning corn ethanol would be 20% less polluting than gasoline. But when the Obama administration tried to work out the math for implementing the RFS way back in 2009, it found that corn ethanol would only be 16% less polluting than gasoline by 2022, based on a maximum yield of 180 bushels of corn per acre.

All the stakeholders complained, saying the government’s figures were too conservative. So the EPA came up with a “high yield case scenario” that achieved a 21% reduction by assuming a yield of 230 bushels per acre. (Getting more bushels off an acre means it took fewer resources to grow each bushel, so it’s environmentally cleaner.)

The problem is that corn growers have never hit that yield number. The yield in 2014 was about 173 bushels per acre. Last year’s yield was 177 bushels per acre, right around the original, and insufficient, government estimate.

Corn might not come up in tonight’s presidential debate. But for all the reasons we’ve touched on here, and so many more (food prices, high-fructose corn syrup, the list goes on), corn will continue to be a big topic from now until November and beyond.