The easiest fix might be pushing for faster adoption of BEVs. Nobody can easily take subsidies away from farmers.
peterbecich · 58m ago
I would be content to settle for carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline. It is politically viable. But the price needs to be lower. The startup Prometheus is working on this.
chrisweekly · 11h ago
BEV - Battery Electric Vehicle
(just in case it's not obvious)
ashoeafoot · 10h ago
Are you aware that by having agriculture directly integrated inro the fuel/electricity market, you have ai compete directly against people for basic survival neccssities?
theoreticalmal · 9h ago
Wouldn’t it technically be “the use of AI complete directly…” a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.
GuinansEyebrows · 8h ago
> “ a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.”
In fiction. What you’re saying is in a fictional scenario designed to benefit humans, this would happen. What in the history of this earth would make you believe that fiction though?
paddy_m · 13h ago
BEV are not a serious climate solution unless you are talking about ebikes. BEV also contribute a load of pollution to waterways via tire wear. ebikes are cheaper to purchase and make a significant change.
decimalenough · 12h ago
They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
speed_spread · 8h ago
Last time I checked, a Tesla 3 (a small car by NA standards) weighted 1800kg. That's twice the weight of my 1987 VW Jetta and very close to that 2T you mention. The weight issue is real; it affects the driving dynamics and makes the energy problem worse in many ways.
dalyons · 5h ago
1987 is not a valid comparison for many reasons. Pick modern premium sedans (eg bmw) as a comparison and you’ll see it isn’t that different.
speed_spread · 4h ago
Modern cars are generally overweight. A 1987 BMW 325 weighted 1200kg. Considering the advances of materials science and digital technology, weight should have gone down, not up. What's the daily purpose of that extra 600kg, other than protecting against an eventual collision with a monstruous pickup?
peterbecich · 1h ago
Safety arms race of vehicle size. We would all be better off collectively with smaller vehicles, imo.
adrianN · 3h ago
Colliding with 1t of car is similarly deadly as with 2t of car. Traffic fatalities have gone way down in the past forty years.
adrianN · 4h ago
BEVs are not that much heavier than comparable ICEs. All modern cars are too big and too heavy. From an energy standpoint weight is less of a problem for electric cars because they can recuperate.
toomuchtodo · 11h ago
90M light vehicles are sold globally every year. As long as consumers demand cars, BEVs are the most climate friendly cars to sell them. Anyone saying “don’t buy cars!” is living a pipe dream.
China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.
(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)
rainsford · 10h ago
Ebikes might have more positive impact, but that doesn't matter unless you can convince a critical mass of people to use them instead of their cars. I say this as someone who thinks ebikes are cool, but that's absolutely not going to happen in any significant way at least in the US. Replacing a gas car with an ebike requires a significant shift in your lifestyle, which most people either can't or don't want to do. The benefit of a BEV is that you can mostly use it exactly like you use the gas car you already have, with some added benefit of being able to "refuel" it at home while you sleep. Changes that people actually adopt are at the end of the day the most impactful ones.
Arubis · 12h ago
Duh. It was never meant to actually be good for the climate. We USians just wanted to point more subsidy money domestically (particular at farmers, the target for virtually every non-kinetic subsidy for decades) instead of using MBTE, which was IIRC mostly of Canadian manufacture.
dehrmann · 10h ago
The part that is useful is there's strategic benefit to surplus food production, and it's an outlet for surplus food.
sheiyei · 3h ago
The sensible way to do biofuel is biogas from cattle. It doesn't slot so neatly into the car network (car needs to be modified to have a gas tank (why the heck do you call petrol gas, you nation of fools??)), but actually lowers the climate footprint of cattle farming even before considering the petrol that would be burnt instead of it: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and eventually burns into CO2 in the atmosphere, so it's better to burn it in an ICE.
Forge36 · 15h ago
Isn't a large part of ethanol it's use as a fuel additive that it boosts octane and is relatively cheap? Compared to leaded gasoline it seems very "green".
Qem · 12h ago
Most crops beyond sugarcane in tropical areas lack biomass output high enough to compensate the need for fossil fuel inputs and land use emissions.
MangoToupe · 15h ago
Turning solar power into something we use to destroy the environment doesn't strike me as very "green" at all. Quite the opposite. I can't imagine it's a very efficient use of money, either.
Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
asdff · 14h ago
It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.
In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.
Qem · 12h ago
The devil is in the details. Where did the land used to plant it came from? What was there before? Deforestation emits a lot of CO2. Fertilizer needs fossil fuels to be manufactured, tractors and harvesters burn diesel, et cetera.
MangoToupe · 11h ago
We could also just feed the food to people who want to kill us and maybe they'll want to kill us less.
AnimalMuppet · 12h ago
Leaded gasoline hasn't been a thing for decades now.
strongpigeon · 12h ago
Except in general aviation, where lead free alternatives are just coming out of the approval pipeline.
lazide · 15h ago
This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.
It was great for farmers though.
throwawaymaths · 14h ago
iirc it is scientifically possible to take corn stover and convert it to bioethanol with net negative carbon emissions.
rgmerk · 13h ago
There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
pfdietz · 11h ago
BEVs powered by PV use two orders of magnitude less land than ICEVs burning biofuels.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
throwawaymaths · 9h ago
> use two orders of magnitude less land
not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)
pfdietz · 4h ago
Using a process that no one is using. Ethanol from cellulose failed.
throwawaymaths · 12h ago
yes I'm aware. in that era, which was last i tracked this field, BP had a pilot plant that reached commercial and greenhouse breakeven, but then they lost the deepwater horizon case and scuttled their biofuels research, I'd be surprised if no one caught up. did no one catch up?
throwawaymaths · 8h ago
this is as much evidence as i can find on the internet that this was a thing, i cant remember where i heard that it was breakeven:
> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel
My thought is if the plant was on track to success but was killed by corporate politics somebody else would have tried again. The demand for carbon-neutral liquid fuels isn’t going away; long-range shipping and aviation aren’t going to run on batteries.
magnuspaaske · 13h ago
There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
worik · 11h ago
Yes
Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.
itsanaccount · 15h ago
It was great for large investor backed farmers who bought out their neighbors via debt, leased expensive John Deere equipment via debt, and are now trapped.
jajko · 13h ago
No word about cutting down whole rain forests (ie on Borneo or mainland Malaysia) just to have more biofuels? I've seen those endless fields of that palm monoculture where almost nothing else lives from above and in person, and also how proper rain forest next to it looks like, it was a very depressing view.
chabska · 4h ago
"Deforestation" is also known as economic development, when someone is not trying to disparage a third world country. Malaysia and Indonedia, with their relatively stable politics and governance, gained a lot of FDI in the 1970's and started developing rapidly. Rainforests were cleared, true, and initially the land was planted with rubber, because that's was the most profitable crop that grows well in this climate. Then rubber price crashed, so the farmers switched to oil palm, the next most profitable crop.
There is no intrinsic link between biofuel and deforestation. If coffee is the most profitable crop, then you'd see an endless sea of coffee plantations in Malaysia. Would you want to ban coffee then? Okay you banned coffee, so cocoa now is the most profitable crop, so you banned cocoa. Now pineapple is the most profitable crop, so forth and so on.
The logical conclusion is that when you try to "save the forest", you are saying that a country has no sovereignty in developing its economy and exploiting its resource to enrich its citizen. "You should stay poor, because I say so".
alephnerd · 12h ago
The palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia are targeted at human consumption - palm oil is the primary cheap cooking oil across Asia, and demand is high.
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
worik · 11h ago
The perfidious outcomes of viewing climate change as a "business opportunity" rather than an urgent crises is making things worse
There are the obvious effects outlined here
There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy
We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn
What a waste
alephnerd · 12h ago
Because just about every country is greenwashing "Energy Security" as "Alternative Energy".
Countries that are supporting BEVs are those countries that have slip capacity to other fuels (renewable AND coal) and rare earth processing, just like those pushing for Hydrogen are those with alternative sourcing supply chains for biofuels and coal, those pushing for continued ONG usage have plenty of access to refining capacity, and those continuing to push for biofuels have the ethanol processing capacity.
The brutal reality is large countries can eat the financial and humanitarian cost of climate change easily, but those worst affected live in countries that cannot. There is a moral case to be made for multilateral climate engagement, but NatSec will always trump morality.
dr_dshiv · 12h ago
Ask ChatGPT what would happen if all ethanol corn farmland were replace by solar panels. Then ask about agrosolar
Instead, why don't you tell us what your point actually is?
dr_dshiv · 4h ago
Over 1.6% of the contiguous USA is dedicated to corn ethanol. If that land were replaced by solar, at 20% capacity, it could produce 10.8 PWh of electricity. That’s two and a half times the total amount of electricity that the US currently produces per year. Biofuels produce the equivalent of ~ 0.4 PWh.
(just in case it's not obvious)
In fiction. What you’re saying is in a fictional scenario designed to benefit humans, this would happen. What in the history of this earth would make you believe that fiction though?
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.
(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)
Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.
It was great for farmers though.
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)
> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel
https://www.nola.com/news/business/bp-shutters-biofuel-plant...
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.
There is no intrinsic link between biofuel and deforestation. If coffee is the most profitable crop, then you'd see an endless sea of coffee plantations in Malaysia. Would you want to ban coffee then? Okay you banned coffee, so cocoa now is the most profitable crop, so you banned cocoa. Now pineapple is the most profitable crop, so forth and so on.
The logical conclusion is that when you try to "save the forest", you are saying that a country has no sovereignty in developing its economy and exploiting its resource to enrich its citizen. "You should stay poor, because I say so".
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
There are the obvious effects outlined here
There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy
We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn
What a waste
Countries that are supporting BEVs are those countries that have slip capacity to other fuels (renewable AND coal) and rare earth processing, just like those pushing for Hydrogen are those with alternative sourcing supply chains for biofuels and coal, those pushing for continued ONG usage have plenty of access to refining capacity, and those continuing to push for biofuels have the ethanol processing capacity.
The brutal reality is large countries can eat the financial and humanitarian cost of climate change easily, but those worst affected live in countries that cannot. There is a moral case to be made for multilateral climate engagement, but NatSec will always trump morality.
1.5% of land area dedicated to solar can produce enough to meet all global energy needs (not just electricity), according to this article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01754-4