While it's true that Big Ag in the U.S. has oversold corn ethanol as a climate-friendly alternative, it's important to distinguish between types of biofuels. Not all ethanol is created equal.
Take Brazil, for example. Their ethanol program is fundamentally different. It's based on sugarcane, not corn, and it has a spectacular EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of about 8:1. That means for every unit of energy put into producing it, eight units are returned. By contrast, U.S. corn ethanol barely breaks even, with an EROI around 1.3:1 to 1.8:1.
Brazilian ethanol also sidesteps many of the land use and food diversion issues that plague U.S. biofuels. Sugarcane is mostly grown on degraded pastureland far from the Amazon, and it doesn’t displace staple food crops. Plus, the leftover biomass (bagasse) is burned to power the refineries themselves, making the process close to energy self-sufficient.
The Brazilian model shows that biofuels can work—but only under the right agricultural, environmental, and economic conditions. The U.S. corn ethanol lobby essentially hijacked the "green energy" narrative to push something that mostly benefits Big Ag subsidies and corn states, with questionable climate gains.
So yeah, skepticism about biofuels is warranted—but we should be careful not to throw out the good examples with the bad.
no_wizard · 44m ago
Assuming all this about Brazilian ethanol is true, the real question for me is scale. The US consumes an enormous amount of gasoline every year compared to just about any other country. That’s what I’m curious about.
analog31 · 37m ago
At what rate do they produce degraded pasture land? Is it renewable?
trollbridge · 30m ago
Brazil is a big place, and growing sugarcane properly actually regenerates the soil, such as if no or low till techniques are used (which are popular in Brazil).
krainboltgreene · 16m ago
I don’t believe there’s any evidence to suggest sugarcane regenerates soil. In fact I can only find evidence to the contrary.
tzs · 8h ago
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?
Where the carbon comes from matters.
When you burn gasoline all of the carbon emitted is carbon that until we took the petroleum it was in out of the ground had been out of the atmosphere for millions of years.
When using gasoline on an ongoing basis the result is a large net increase in atmosphere carbon from burning the gasoline, plus whatever similarly old carbon is emitted during the processing of the petroleum into gasoline.
When you burn ethanol that was made from corn all of the carbon emitted is carbon that was in the atmosphere until the corn took it out of the atmosphere to use in photosynthesis.
When using ethanol from corn on an ongoing basis there is no increase in atmospheric carbon from burning the ethanol. There is just an increase from whatever old carbon is emitted in the process of growing the corn and turning it into ethanol.
scaramanga · 6h ago
It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields.
But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss.
All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.
jbstack · 3h ago
"People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields"
This doesn't make any sense to me. With petrol, you are transferring carbon from a store to the atmosphere every time you use it for energy. With a wetland, you only destroy it once (thus releasing carbon from the store) the first time you use it to produce corn. Every time after that you're capturing carbon (in corn) and then releasing it again (when burning the biofuel).
Yes, it's an oversimplified analogy (there are many more subtleties such as the amount of carbon in wetland vs corn, the carbon requirements of the production and retail process of petrol vs biofuel, etc.). But even if we made the model more complex, it's still fundamentally two entirely different scenarios. One is just a continuous release from carbon stores while the other aims to restructure a carbon store so that it can release and capture in a cycle.
griffzhowl · 3h ago
I think the idea is that the wetland or forest or whatever is a carbon sink in the sense that they have a net negative effect on carbon in the atmosphere each year. Growing corn and then burning it would at best be net zero if no further atmospheric carbon were produced by the production processes, fertilizers etc., which it is. So the differences between the two scenarios is net negative versus net positive atmospheric carbon each year.
RivieraKid · 1h ago
A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
griffzhowl · 49m ago
Most of the land in question isn't a mature ecosystem in equilibrium, and if it is there are other arguments against turning that into cornfields. But let's say the worst case is that it's carbon neutral.
The point is that biofuel production isn't carbon neutral. Maybe it could be theoretically, but in practice it takes energy inputs in the production process like in the fertilizers, processing of crop into fuel, and transport/distribution, which makes it net positive for atmospheric carbon.
karolinepauls · 1h ago
The world is more complicated than a 17th century lab experiment in combustion.
Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions.
> When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation occurs. This process eventually leads to the formation of deep peat deposits, which can accumulate for thousands of years.
Dead trees and other plants in a mature forest is decomposed and in that process, carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
lazytitanic · 1h ago
> Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal
Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon in the charcoal resulting from forest fires isn't sequestered any more than the same carbon in the forest when in its un-burned state. The only difference is that, once you have a forest fire, a lot of the carbon is also just released into the atmosphere as CO2 in smoke.
lazide · 1h ago
Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.
Show me the megatons/year of charcoal being produced by the worlds forests eh?
We could process them yes, but we can also just make them into timber - or burn them for energy. Or just bury them somewhere under a bunch of clay. Oh, and now we’re back to this thread.
circlefavshape · 1h ago
I don't think that's true - my understanding is a forest produces soil continuously, and that's a carbon sink
RivieraKid · 1h ago
This was true in the carboniferous period, when the organisms able to metabolize the lignin in trees haven't evolved yet, so the dead trees ended up as coal.
pfdietz · 1h ago
Soil too eventually reaches an equilibrium where carbon injection and carbon oxidation are in balance.
If what you thought was true, imagine a forest sitting there for millions of years. Where would this permanently sequestered carbon be going? Soils do not become unboundedly thick.
circlefavshape · 49m ago
hmmm ... but forests don't actually sit there for millions of years, right? and either way soils get eroded and ultimately end up on the ocean floor
Well, that's what oil and coal are. Oil is formed from marine biomass, and coal is formed from plants.
jkhdigital · 2h ago
Except that industrial-scale agriculture in general requires quite a bit of exogenous petrochemical inputs—not just the fuel to power the machines that do the work, but also the fertilizer.
bluGill · 2h ago
Still far less carbon than used for gasoline
pfdietz · 1h ago
The energy for fertilizer is mostly in the nitrogen fertilizer. The energy input here is to make hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process. This hydrogen can come from renewable sources ("green hydrogen"), and this would be an excellent way to counter long term variability in renewable output.
That the hydrogen currently comes from natural gas is no argument it must come from natural gas, any more than cars currently using petroleum derived fuels would imply they must use petroleum derived fuels.
motorest · 5h ago
> It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields.
The key point is that biofuel replaces fossil fuel. Meaning, instead of having a system that inputs carbon into the environment, you have a system that recycles carbon already in the environment.
It's impossible to argue against this is a significant and unequivocal improvement.
The points you raised were about corn-based biofuel. Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass, and how it would be the primary crop driving biofuels. I feel like framing biofuels as a corn-based crop is a red herring.
> All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, (...)
Yes, including those from fossil fuels.
patwolf · 1h ago
> Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass
I hadn't heard "switchgrass" since GWB mentioned it in his State of the Union years ago. Did it end up becoming a significant source of biofuel?
bravesoul2 · 3h ago
Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.
motorest · 1h ago
> Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.
It doesn't counter it. At best, it plays on a fallacy that burying the lead only leaves the red herring as argument.
But corn-based biofuel is a red herring. Try to understand it.
Your blend of argument is the same type of strategy used to denigrate electric cars, where complaining that the fact that electricity can be generated from coal is this major gotcha. It isn't. It's one of many ways to generate it. There are others, and the end result is always better for the environment.
throwaway_5633 · 3h ago
One of the things that concerns me most after studying agriculture for a couple of years is that people may definitely starve to fill other people’s gas tank. A lack of arable land is imminent and high income people at the gas pump, or eating meat (same economics) may well outspend those who don’t have enough food. Part of food inflation is attributed to biofuels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
trollbridge · 20m ago
Hasn’t happened in Brazil at all, where food is quite affordable, and they’re a gigantic food exporter too.
merelysounds · 5h ago
To be fair, it seems there are already regulations, both in the US and worldwide, that take into account LCA in some way.
But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.
thelastgallon · 35m ago
>Where the carbon comes from matters.
Your underlying assumption is carbon is required. We could use the same land for solar panels. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
When we produce this much electricity from solar, without fossil fuels, we'll also save 40% of water withdrawals. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
mapt · 2h ago
Yes, that is indeed what was sold to us 30+ years ago. This background context is in the article; The rest of the article is about how that was a lie.
By about 20 years ago we understood that this was nonsense, that farm equipment and transportation infrastructure for corn cultivation chugs diesel, that somewhere between half, all, or twice (depending on study) the fossil fuels saved by corn ethanol would be burned to produce it.
Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel suck. Sugarcane ethanol works with high EROI. WVO biodiesel is almost pure profit. There were suggestions that cellulosic ethanol (switchgrass, miscanthus) and algal biodiesel could be productive enough to be worthwhile, but they have not taken over, and subsidy has been directed consistently to boosting existing corn producers in order to win the Iowa Caucus.
circlefavshape · 1h ago
if it's half, then corn ethanol is totally worthwhile, right?
7952 · 2h ago
Ultimately what matters is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Biofuels could help or hinder that effort. It all depends on the wider system.
raverbashing · 4h ago
That being said, growing corn for fuel ethanol is stupid.
Other crops are more efficient
(Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
9rx · 1h ago
The trouble with corn is that its yield band is huge. Get a good growing year and suddenly you have twice as much as you need — and more than you can store, leaving it out to rot. Recapturing that energy as fuel instead of disappearing waste heat is a win and what corn-based ethanol was introduced for.
The trouble with humans is that they aren't very good at moderation. As soon as they see a little opportunity to do something good they take it to the extreme, to the point that it is no longer good.
trollbridge · 11m ago
Excess corn crops in the 1800s were used to make (corn mash) whisky.
Cthulhu_ · 3h ago
What crops are those, and do they grow in the same climates and soils as corn does at the moment?
dherikb · 3h ago
Sugarcane, I believe.
brabel · 2h ago
Yes sugar cane is much cheaper and efficient. But you need very warm climate to grow it. Brazil has that and uses sugar cane for the most part. The USA does not so it uses what grows well in its interior , which is corn.
jayd16 · 8h ago
Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.
mapt · 2h ago
This is such an off-base critique that it seems like deliberate trolling. The biofuel renewable carbon cycle takes carbon from the air, and burns the carbon once it's in the form of ethanol. It stops taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the sky.
The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some studies) or not even (in others) produce more fuel than you burned.
If you electrify your farming you don't have this problem. A far-future use-case is that we have eliminated 95% of fossil fuel use, and use solar-battery-powered tractors, trucks, and combines to harvest biofuels in order to fuel long-haul aviation and certain other legacy hardware that proved difficult to electrify.
Null-Set · 1h ago
So fuel would basically become a corn based battery. (Ideally something more efficient than corn would be grown though)
lazide · 8h ago
No they aren’t.
Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral.
Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon.
Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon.
But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
passwordoops · 3h ago
"Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral."
No they do not. The accounting generally doesn't take into account the full emissions of agriculture, which for corn is particularly carbon intense. Not to mention the downstream pollution impacts of over fertilization, such as coastal dead zones
jkhdigital · 2h ago
This is the salient point that is glossed over without so much as blinking.
To get 1J of biofuel-based fuel, how many J of fossil fuel is burned? If it’s like 0.9J then you really have to ask how much carbon is released when turning carbon sinks into farmland, because it will take many many crop cycles to recoup that from biofuels.
lazide · 1h ago
That is the implementation detail that makes the whole thing a scam, yes. None of that is fundamental to bio-fuels, but rather a property of it being cheaper to do it that way in our current fossil fuel economy, and people not being interested in looking all that closely because they don’t really care.
9rx · 21m ago
What is not factored into the above is how much is going to be grown anyway. Corn yield in particular can quickly surprise you. Even if you try to only grow enough for food, there will be years where you still have way more than you can handle.
That is why we started producing corn-based ethanol. It wasn't intended to see people grow corn for it, but rather clean up the unmanageable excesses realized in the due course of growing it for food-based reasons that otherwise would have been left out to rot. In that vein, J is insignificant as it is spent either way.
The problem is that humans aren't very good at moderation. A little ethanol production is quite sensible, but once humans get it into their head something might be sensible in small doses they have to take it to a ridiculous extreme... You see that in everything.
theurerjohn3 · 5h ago
i think there may have been some confusion about the parent comment
you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
then the correct approach would be
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for *burying in the ground* and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
unless i am misunderstanding these two comments? some clarity would be great!
lazide · 5h ago
If we could grow the same amount of corn (to offset the carbon in the gasoline) and bury it where it would not rot/decompose (turned that carbon into now fossil carbon), then turn around and burn fossil fuel gasoline, then from a carbon neutral perspective, yes that would ‘balance the scales’.
It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into ethanol, and leave the fossil fuels out of it? (* of course current agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels itself, so the math isn’t that simple. For it to actually work, we’d need to ensure the entire vertical was fossil fuel free)
Of course, it’s a lot more direct and effective to use electric vehicles, near as I can tell.
in_cahoots · 10h ago
I read the whole article and I still don't see how Big Ag misled anyone. I may be misunderstanding, but it seems that the author is trying to differentiate between growing corn for food vs growing the same corn for ethanol. I assume the entire reason the lobby exists is that farmers want to grow corn for food and ethanol. But the researcher lost interest before proving anything around there. Maybe ethanol is actually worse, but I didn't see any evidence in this article.
Instead, this article is a master class in the red herring fallacy. Every person on the 'wrong' side of the issue has their sordid past and connections exposed, whether it's their association with Wall Street or the fact that they're a sex offender. Nevermind the science, the author just assumes that because the reader (presumably) has a certain political persuasion denigrating the other side will serve as a convincing argument.
knappe · 8h ago
This is an excerpt from Eating the Earth. The entire point of the book is that when we consider land use, we're not accounting for other uses for that same land (or how other land would be used) because the land, prior to Searchinger's work in the field all calculations did not consider this factor. Even after Searchinger published their work showing the flaws on land use, it was often ignored.
If you find the excerpt underwhelming, go read the book. I will warn you that in some ways it feels more like a memoir of Searchinger's life than a book on land use considerations, but, despite that, it still does a great job of showing how land use is still not being accounted for in all situations.
I finished Eating the Earth last week and found it rather interesting to read.
verisimi · 7h ago
> If you find the excerpt underwhelming, go read the book
... and be overwhelming underwhelmed?
sien · 8h ago
The EU does something impressively crazy burning 23 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021.
That it isn't sustainable. As Eating the Earth points out, by growing trees to then cut them down again we're not accounting for the cost of using that same forested land for anything else, like a forest which is a great carbon sink. Instead burning wood pellets is considered renewable until you consider the cost of using that land for something else in which case it isn't a renewal resource.
happosai · 7h ago
The word renewable has a specific meaning (the source renews). Just because something is renewable, doesn't mean it's climate-friendly and/or sustainable.
Burning pellets as Bioenergy is renewable - it's just not sustainable[1] or climate-friendly.
[1] not sustainable in large scale use.
eptcyka · 7h ago
Burning wood pellets is carbon neutral. Any forrest is a great carbon sink until it matures and it saturates, i.e. growth reaches replacement equilibrium and old trees/growth decay, releasing the CO2.
sl-1 · 2h ago
This is not taking in to account the fossil fuel usage for growing wood, transporting it and processing it to pellets.
Biofuels rarely make sense, unless we can get the biomass as a side-flow from some other process. And that kind of flows are quite limited compared to our energy needs.
7952 · 2h ago
It depends on the time and spatial scale. And how much replanting is happening.
lazide · 8h ago
That makes no sense with the definition of ‘renewable’.
Trees grow again. They are renewed.
What is this junk?
fodkodrasz · 7h ago
The soil is degraded, washed away on clear-cut forests, and even old-growth protected forests are being relabeled unprotected to provide energy for the industry all over Eastern-Europe. The resulting flash floods, the water of which is harder to retain on the lowlands are worsening the droughts and the effects of climate change.
Ah, end eventually trees will not regrow, because they need soil for that. And water. Modern forestry is far from renewable. Only externalities having a longer time-frame to kick in are conveniently ignored by the decision makers and the masses willing to see only the upsides.
lazide · 2h ago
In the US that is not how it has been done in a very, very long time. At this point all US timberland is multi-generation new growth; and is doing just fine.
knappe · 7h ago
It makes perfect sense.
Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest. The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The land used is not free; it could have instead stayed a forest and remained a carbon sink. When you compare wood pellets using for generating energy and compare it to other forms of energy generation it no longer holds up as a renewable resource after you take into account the land that could have been kept instead as a forest and carbon sink.
lazide · 7h ago
Forests are not long term carbon sinks. They flatline rather quickly.
This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil.
Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning.
The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 year old range, because that is when the bulk of the actual growth is occurring.
Renewable doesn’t mean ‘indefinite carbon sink’. Renewable means ‘renews’.
This entire discussion is incredibly ridiculous.
knappe · 7h ago
Look dude, read the papers or read the book. I don't have much more to offer you. This isn't just about the forest itself but about the land used to grow the forest.
"In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests, published in Nature in 2023, WRI researchers using a biophysical model estimated that annual wood harvests over the next few decades will emit 3.5-4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. That is more than 3 times the world’s current annual average aviation emissions. These wood-harvest emissions occur because the great majority of carbon stored in trees is released to the atmosphere after harvest when roots and slash decompose; as most wood is burned directly for heat or electricity or for energy at sawmills or paper mills; and when discarded paper products, furniture and other wood products decompose or burn. Another recent paper in Nature found that the word’s remaining forests have lost even more carbon, primarily due to harvesting wood, than was lost historically by converting forests to agriculture (other studies have found similar results1). Based on these analyses, a natural climate solution would involve harvesting less wood and letting more forests regrow. This would store more carbon as well as enhance forest biodiversity."[0]
So I see what you’re saying. You’re talking about the whole system. Take land and then plant trees, the trees sequester carbon as they grow, some of them fall to the forest floor continuing to sequester carbon. But, I think the issue with your argument is, this process isn’t indefinite. The natural cycle is that these trees will decay, fall, rot (releasing carbon naturally) or natural forest fires will burn them anyways (releasing carbon naturally). Then more trees will take their places and sequester carbon, ad infinitum in the cycle that has taken place for the last 2 billion years since the Paleoproterozoic era.
But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.
dmbche · 4h ago
Go look at the article about the effects of the introduction of wolves back in yellowstone that was frontpage yesterday.
That f'ing with one species.
Now imagine the impact of f'ing with the forest itself.
Could the capacity to sequester carbon be affected by second or third order effects?
wizzwizz4 · 5h ago
The planet isn't infinite: by running the cycle more quickly, you knock the "baseline" atmospheric carbon up a few more ppm. This has knock-on effects.
lazide · 4h ago
Even if we converted all arable land in the United States to forest, best case we would take many years to sequester even a single years fossil carbon emissions. And we’d all starve to death in the process.
Any co2 released by harvesting a forest, is very shortly taken back up again by the forest regrowing. Within a lifetime for sure.
Trees are nice, I get it. But this is all in the noise.
wizzwizz4 · 4h ago
Where do these numbers come from?
lazide · 1h ago
USFS studies, and US data on overall arable land. I broke it out in a prior thread exhaustively, but it’s been covered in other areas too. Here is one [https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_wo059.pdf]
The US emits a truly massive amount of fossil carbon. [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...], “Total emissions in 2022 are 6,343.2 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent”. Yes, that is 6 billion metric tons of co2 equivalent a year. 6 trillion kg. Or about 20,000 kg per person in the US, every year.
Currently (since ~ 1990), US forested land is estimated to offset ~ 13% of fossil co2 emissions. Forests cover 36% (!) of US land area, and have been slowly increasing since ~ 2000.
Pretty much all the rest is either 1) waterways, 2) cities, 3) non-arable land like steep mountains and deserts with no ready source of water.
So even with a back of the envelope, easy math, if we changed all our farmland to grow forests, we’d roughly double the amount of carbon we could sequester - which would still be ~ 25% of the amount of fossil carbon we’re emitting, every year.
And then we would still need to DO something with all that wood, because burning it or letting it rot just releases all it’s co2 back into the atmosphere.
And we’d all starve to death in the meantime.
lazide · 5h ago
Modeling a forest like a spring is a better model than a petrochemical reservoir. (Though a water reservoir is not a terrible analogy if forest fires == a dam breaking! And overflows or evaporation == rotting.)
The (very common) thinking that forests are ‘sinks’ (aka it goes in one way and stays) or like a petrochemical reservoir (we can put it in, or take it out - but it stays there once in, or out) are a big part of the confusion.
On a geological timescale, carbon being stored in a forest is a temporary and rather rare circumstance. Some global percentage will always be in vegetation (see carbon cycle), but any given atom will move around a lot.
Harvesting forests and burning them, takes carbon that was in the atmosphere, then in wood, then puts it back in the atmosphere. Total carbon in the atmosphere was only temporarily out of it in this situation.
If we wanted to permanently take it out of the atmosphere, we’d need to bury all those trees (deep enough where they won’t decompose and/or the decomposition products won’t make it into the atmosphere!). Turning it into furniture or building products is a more useful, but shorter term solution.
One idea-logically most pure solution would be to puree them and inject them into old depleted oil fields, eh?
Because otherwise those trees will just burn, die and decompose, etc. - it’s inevitable.
Ideally they would be replaced in a shortish timeframe by new trees or growth, roughly locking up the same amount of carbon. But that doesn’t always happen.
And people aren’t allowed to clear cut forests in the US (generally) anymore. Most (all?) US timberland is multi-generational new growth now at this point, and is harvested using as realistically healthy a process as possible. If we had battery powered industrial equipment, it would be even better.
I’ve read the papers, and I’ve done the math many times.
The amount of carbon being released by burning the trees, is roughly the same amount as was taken out by them growing. That’s the nature of it. When they regrow,they’ll take more out.
That is the nature of being renewable. Unlike fossil fuels, where chances are no more will replace it naturally.
Complaining about someone cutting down the trees, specifically from a ‘renewable’/‘total carbon’ perspective is silly in this context. The carbon released isn’t even fossil carbon, and will be back in the trees soon enough - less than a lifetime!
And I’ve done the math - even if we turned all of the arable land in North America into forests, based on the USDA data from National Forests, it would take 4-10ish years worth of growth to temporary store 1 years worth of fossil carbon being released just by the US right now.
Every year.
And to even try that, we’d all starve, because we turned all our crop land into forests too.
Worry about the massive quantities of fossil carbon still getting sucked out of the ground. That is what is feeding the impending disaster.
Unless people are salting the earth and stopping further growth (which generally is already forbidden in the US!), cutting down and burning a forest is a temporary nudge in the accounting that will self correct.
Generally most of it will get used in lumber though, which means it should net decrease atmospheric carbon until it rots or burns in a fire. If landfilled, it could go thousands of years.
In summary - the math doesn’t actually check out when you look at it over realistic timescales, and this is more an ideological thing than an actual real thing. I love trees. But they aren’t going to save us from this mess, no matter how hard core we go.
vintermann · 6h ago
Sinks is about flows. The question is about reservoirs. Forests are a long term carbon reservoir. Yes, it's possible to regrow it and let it stay that way. But we don't do that if we regularly chop it down for wood pellets. If we regularly do that, then the carbon in it will spend more of its time in the atmosphere and cause trouble, even if it wasn't pumped from a fossil reservoir.
This is why you can't ignore land use changes in carbon budgets. It's a sound argument, it's not ridiculous at all.
rrobukef · 3h ago
I disagree, wood pellets are more expensive than oil for energy, especially if only counting the production cost of oil w/o the tax. So even the first time an old forest is cut, when the land changes, it already displaces oil use. At greater expense even, so demand would be reduce the amount energy produced further.
Furthermore Europe can also choose to replant non-forest land or replant permanently afterwards.
fodkodrasz · 7h ago
The soil they create, if they stay alive and are able to retain the soil layer, is gradually washed away (and locally replenished) and is fertilizing the lowlands.
7952 · 2h ago
So do fish when they are harvested from the ocean. But that doesn't mean it is sustainable.
rini17 · 7h ago
The soil gets depleted when biomass is consistently taken away. It might be possible to avoid it but that's cost center.
lazide · 7h ago
Carbon comes from the atmosphere in this scenario.
Crops can be rotated.
Trees can be non-clear cut when harvested.
None of this changes the definition of renewable.
rini17 · 3h ago
In practice we want forest soil not eroded away after clear cut logging, but also not depleted nutrients like phosphorus, nor prone to wildfires[note], nor trees damaged by acid rain etc. Definition of "sustainable" in the law alone is not sufficient to cover all this and never will be, some discretion and responsibility is required.
[note] depends on the biome, part of said discretion
paganel · 7h ago
Because is bs, pure and simple. Typical Brussels re-inventing the definition of words in order to push their political objectives.
petre · 7h ago
I would agree if you'd be talking about branding gas as sustainable, which Germany actually tried before the war in Ukraine and the sabotage of the Northstream pipeline. But in this context, it's pure hogwash. Burning wood pellets is actually sustainable and renewable and has been a net win for Eastern European counrties that joined the EU, mainly because little to no sawdust is discarded into rivers and streams any longer. I remember the 2000s and before, when we hiked through the mountains: wherever there was a wood processing plant, there were also overflowing heaps of sawdust. None of that is a reality any longer, all of it is pelletized, sold and burned.
soco · 4h ago
The issue with Eastern European woods is that they're being razed - for pellets, furniture, you name it. And rarely replaced. So yes in some places you'll have new growth, but most places there's soil washing and flash floods and destroyed habitats and all that. Is that renewable? Hardly.
hibikir · 3h ago
There's a whole lot of buildings that were designed with a coal furnace in the basement which heats water, and all aparments getting a bunch of water radiators. A switch from that to, say, a typical American forced air system is a huge expense, and it might not be all that easy to design a system that is well balanced anyway given the small space for said ducts.
So when a building association finds themselves having to replace the old furnace, given that getting a new coal furnace is now illegal, the pellets are seen as the reasonable, if not wonderful alternative.
petre · 7h ago
What do you think the furniture industry does with the wood byproducts such as sawdust and bark?
fodkodrasz · 7h ago
adds glue to it and creates more "wooden" furniture from it
blitzar · 5h ago
IKEA. We should burn discarded ikea (wooden) furniture too.
burnt-resistor · 7h ago
Corn and most ag subsidies are using taxpayer money for corporate welfare for mostly mega farming consortia with a smattering of medium and smaller farmers, who also can't exist in the rigged market without welfare. 5% of all US land, not just arable land, ALL land is used for mostly cow corn. It's absolute insanity.
And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
AngryData · 7h ago
Crop subsidies are certainly poorly applied and poorly distributed, but we also need to not throw the baby out with the bath water. Crop subsidization is the only alternative to the granary system, which while decent still resulted in repeated famines for thousands of years basically everywhere, while no country that has decent crop subsidization ever has famine. Crop subsidization in general makes granaries 90% obsolete because you always aim to over produce crops and so even in bad years you still produce enough food despite the unexpectedly low yields. It also makes food prices WAY more stable so that a bad July doesn't cause wheat prices to double because there isn't enough to satisfy demand. It is really the only way to ensure you always produce extra food in a capitalist economy because otherwise margins are only like 2% while crop yields can swing 30% even without extraordinary weather events or storm damage.
I do want to note though that corn is possibly one of the least useful crops to subsidize, it is one of the most robust and predictable food crops we grow, which is why so much of it is grown despite a large fraction of it's energy going into worthless stalk. More delicate crops that have larger and less predictable yield swings, like wheat, or something with delicate fruits that can't be stored long, likely deserve the majority of subsidization money that currently goes towards corn.
mschuster91 · 6h ago
The problem is, you almost always end up with a massive amount of overproduction. That either ends up diverted into fuel production, which raises ethical concerns on one side and prolongs the use of fossil fuels because it's "effectively free" and so stops people from switching over to electric mobility on the other side.
And on top of that, many Western countries routinely dump their overproduction on Africa, where as a result of all that free aid, local food production industry has all but vanished. Up until the '00s, Simbabwe was known as "Africa's corn chamber" - that is long gone now.
burnt-resistor · 5h ago
Grain overproduction is also a significant driver of climate change. Fossil fuels, meat, and GMO monocultures aren't ecologically sustainable in current form, they continue because of capture of factions of governments by corrupt lobbying interests who threaten elected officials into driving more cash and favorable regulations their way.
bbarnett · 4h ago
People need to stop pointing the finger at food production, with such massive blinders on. Food "overproduction", are you actually serious? Are people so removed from farming, and food production, that they think it's a simple thing?
Plant X food, get X food?
Absolutely not! Even with irrigation, there are years with drought, yes even in the West. There are years that are too cloudy, or too sunny (yes, too sunny is a thing). There are years with locusts, and no insecticide doesn't completely solve that. And regardless of global warming or not, some seasons have always been worse for hurricanes, tornadoes, and some events at harvest time can wipe out crops entirely!
Outside of all of the above, few nations feed themselves on their own output. External food production can wither and vanish in an instant, whether through war, or inclement weather too.
You must overproduce to ensure a continuity of food supply. It's the same reason that fallow farmland must be a thing, too. There must be extra, there must be a safety net.
Only people who have never starved, never been truly hungry would espouse such things.
mschuster91 · 2m ago
I agree, but we have to take care that getting rid of excess production (i.e. post reserve building/maintenance) is not going to fuck up supply chains in other countries, like it did in Africa.
9rx · 52m ago
> and some events at harvest time can wipe out crops entirely!
And that swings both ways. Last year, with the stars aligning just right, the corn yields around here were ~100 bushels per acre higher than even our most optimistic pre-harvest estimates. That is an incredible amount of unexpected extra product. Corn especially has a huge, unpredictable yield band.
Which, of course, is exactly why we started producing corn-based ethanol. To buffer the periods of uncontrollable excess — where the previous alternative was to see it rot away.
MindSpunk · 3h ago
We saw what happens when you use just-in-time manufacturing and keep minimal stock of material when covid collapsed supply chains a few years ago. Imagine if that was our food supply instead. The over production is the price we pay for food security.
hibikir · 3h ago
Unfortunately farmers everywhere get subsidies: A lot of European farming would collapse and be replaced by farming done in the southern hemisphere if there weren't subsidies.
As for too much corn, it's a purely economical plan: There's rotation with soybeans in most of the midwest because corn-corn-sobeans is more profitable and treats the land better. Your typical farmer would change to anything else that makes more money per acre, especially if it needs fewer treatments.
As for the total acreage, corn is the second highest in land coverage. There's a worse one: Lawn grass. It just sits there, requires a bunch of maintenance, and produces no economic output. It's often also mandatory: My county's minimal ratios mean 75% of my property has to be well maintained lawn
lithos · 2h ago
There are some loose numbers tosed around like agricultural ethanol being 2x the carbon emissions of big oil.
While not circled around to properly destroying a wetland for farming, is also destroying a far more permanent carbon sink than a farm.
-----
IMO the article is tripping over itself to tell a story and cares about that story far more than factual information.
It could even help for some types of people, even if it's likely painful for the people reading from here.
hibikir · 3h ago
It's also not the same corn varieties for different uses. Most of what we'd feed humans would be sweet corn, and that's not ideal for ethanol, or animal feed. If you look at total acreage planted, sweet corn is just 1% of the total crop.
scaramanga · 6h ago
Yeah, the details are scattered through the article, so you've got to pay close attention. It says that the LCA that the industry produced ignored the carbon intensivity of draining wetland, creating more farmland, and fertilizing it. When that's accounted for (last 2 paragraphs, the bit of hagiography on Searchinger), biofuels isn't a climate policy anymore. Using an LCA that ignores the carbon emissions you're creating, misleads people, whether done on purpose or not.
"These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years"
lelandbatey · 10h ago
The corn varieties grown for industrial ethanol production are mutually exclusive with the corn varieties grown for human consumption; you cannot use one for the other. They might as well be corn vs soy beans.
somat · 10h ago
Fun fact: corn farmers almost always rotate with soybeans to replenish the nitrogen in the soil.
Also, most corn (and soybeans) is for animal food anyway. Very little of the corn grown in the US is for human consumption.
My understanding(not a corn farmer but have watched a show by one on youtube) is the farmer will harvest the corn then dry and store it, selling over the course of a year or two, the ethanol plant is sort of the fallback option when they need to get rid if it.
Personally, I am in the rapeseed bandwagon. Ethanol is not a very good fuel, better to be growing bio-diesel
kwk1 · 10h ago
> little of the corn grown in the US is for human consumption.
Yup, just as a point of reference, something like 70% of Illinois corn goes straight into Illinois hogs.
in_cahoots · 10h ago
I assumed something similar. But the author presents this as some sort of trump card, as if the agriculture industry was suggesting farmers grow corn for ethanol instead of for food. And then the researcher lost interest before he could be proven right. Maybe he actually was right, but there's no evidence here.
giantg2 · 10h ago
I believe they grow field corn for animal feed as well as for ethanol. Technically some processed foods also use field corn. While there are a number of varieties of field corn, I don't believe any are exclusive to ethanol production and could be used in other capacities.
PaulHoule · 11h ago
For years I saw saturation ads for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation on PBS, I found out years that this is the prime beneficiary of the ethanol program.
Farmers growing corn for ethanol are growing broke despite subsidies. The program is an environmental disaster because people in the Mississippi River basin should be growing anything except corn because corn is a crop that requires huge imports of nitrogen fertilizer which burns fuel and leaches into the environment and creates a huge dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico.
Farmers make much better money from agrivoltaics, if they can convert 10-20% of their land they can produce a huge amount of energy and spare the fertilizer, it is not a one-way trip, the solar cells can be removed in the future and in the meantime it supports a more diverse ecosystem. People have no idea what a win-win it is.
0xbadcafebee · 10h ago
Farmers could make more money if we subsidized fresh vegetables rather than ethanol, and it would make us healthier.
toomuchtodo · 9h ago
The purpose of the system is what it does. That would not enrich the people and orgs currently being enriched by the subsidies provided for biofuels. The US is farming ~60M acres just for ethanol and biodiesel.
LinXitoW · 5h ago
Certainly, but that would also indirectly de-subsidize the animal agricultural industry. People are addicted to their animal products, going so far as to pretend they're essential and not just a luxury.
fsflover · 5h ago
Increased price would provide a clear message to these people.
Unless I'm going senile, I've done this calculation a few times and consistently I get that a solar farm produces 25-50 times more energy a year than corn.
febusravenga · 6h ago
But corn is _stored_ energy that can be used at any time. PV is energy ar the current moment. Seems like this 20x loss the cost of storage...
Interesting take though, I'm not saying that growing corn is best way to "produce stored energy", but in your comparison it's almost like direct competition to for PV + batteries of any sort.
horseradish7k · 5h ago
it's at the current moment, but somewhat constant and predictable. the sun is available all year round*.
zekrioca · 5h ago
Batteries.
bluGill · 2h ago
Not nearly as energy dense. Useful for some applicatons but liquid chemical fuels deliver more energy when space or weight are factors - despite the inefficiency.
Not that it can't work, but that looks like oil companies trying to kill what we have today with a promise of something better in the future so they can keep selling oil.
thijson · 6h ago
I think I've seen that too. Plants convert solar energy to chemical energy with an efficiency of a few percent. Solar cells are around 20% efficient, and do it year round, even in the winter.
ars · 10h ago
They should switch to growing sugar cane. There's a high demand for sugar, plus sugar works even better than corn for ethanol.
mikepavone · 10h ago
Most places growing corn don't have the right climate for sugar cane.
Scoundreller · 9h ago
Sugar beets is the primary source of domestic produced sugar in US/Canada
gadders · 5h ago
And the UK
ZeWaka · 7h ago
Do you know how you harvest sugar cane? You *burn* it.
hliyan · 8h ago
One (yet to be verified) insight I've had of late is that we make an implicit, paradoxical assumption about the unimpeded operation of the free market: that the rationality of market participants (a function of education), and their decision making (a function of information dissemination) somehow exists on a substrate unaffected by the market forces. In reality, not only are education and information (news) commoditized, but their supply is intermingled with the market dynamics of other products.
For example, say it costs a supplier X per year to safely eliminate a negative externality (e.g. local air pollution) that would otherwise cause a percentage of consumers to form a negative opinion of the brand and shift to competitors. Now say it costs Y to purchase a level of control of information flow (news, PR, which are naturally commoditized) that could mitigate said negative public opinion. If Y < X, an economically rational (but ethically unscrupulous) actor would choose the second avenue.
zekrioca · 5h ago
Which is what is happening right now.
TomMasz · 1h ago
Ah, E85. My wife's flex-fuel Chevy could use it, but it ran poorly and mileage noticeably dropped. It wasn't worth the meager savings (it's usually more expensive now) over regular gas. I've always wondered about the environmental impact. It's clear now that it's not great. I'm not surprised.
graeme · 10h ago
I remember when the corn subsidies were introduced. I don't recall seeing any favourable commentary. Nor do I remember anyone in real life discussing them or saying "gee I'm glad we're saying the environment with biofuels"
For anyone who had heard of them the program seemed pretty transparently a way to put a fig leaf on an extra subsidy. Big agriculture may not have spoken accurately about the programs but I doubt they succeeded in misleading anyone. Maybe in the states receiving subsidies, no firsthand experience of the marketing there.
tim333 · 1h ago
I had similar thoughts, although I'm a Brit, all coverage I've seen says it's environmentally largely useless but big ag has paid appropriate contributions to politicians to make it happen because money.
bgwalter · 4m ago
Biofuels get the subsidies so that in case of a major crisis like war there is enough food and some fuel for essential services.
It is not that hard to understand. It is possible that studies were tweaked to support another narrative, but farm subsidies always serve strategic interests.
ptman · 8h ago
80% of UK’s waste oil would only power 0.6% of its flights
Using synthetic e-fuel for all USA domestic flights would use 85% of USA’s electricity generated.
Powering UK flights on plant-based biofuels would use >50% of its agricultural land
2⃣ UK waste oil is already spoken for, used in soap, cosmetics etc.
But it’s far short of what would be needed anyway.
Instead we will import ‘waste’ from places like Malaysia, which also happens to be a major palm oil producer (worse than diesel for warming).
3⃣ Synthetic e-fuels use lots of electricity.
Using renewables doesn’t make it ok.
That’s because, until we fully decarbonise, it diverts renewables from reducing the burning of gas & oil, worsening climate change.
4⃣ UK Gov isn’t pushing crop-based bio-fuels, but other nations are, like Singapore.
These have high emissions, because they lead to forest destruction. They also threaten food shortages, with warming already hitting crop yields—and ecosystem collapse.
This why im still a huge advocate for building nuclear power. In order to synthesize this kind of stuff from air instead of wasting all our farmland on it to have carbon neutral liquid or gas fuels available, we need insane amounts of energy. For some things batteries and other tech are the better option to switch to, but petroleum is still king for many applications and farming it with plants is extremely land inefficient. So direct air synthesis using ass tons of energy which nuclear could provide is the clear and straight forward solution that doesn't require hand wavy future technology improvements or unrealistic ideas of using over half our farmland to grow fuels or covering significant percentages of the earth's surface with solar panels.
tim333 · 1h ago
What if solar in the desert is cheaper and easier?
One of the main issues with switching to biofuel is it costs way more than regular. Mandating an expensive way to make it won't fix that.
zekrioca · 5h ago
Should we set nuclear facilities all over the country?
gadders · 4h ago
You mean like an SMR? Yes, if they can be secured.
If we went for full size nuclear reactors, though, I doubt we would need more than half a dozen more in the UK.
scotty79 · 4h ago
Yes.
thijson · 1h ago
I've found this web site to be informative about what it would take to go fully renewable:
Cato Institute is big L Libertarian, not classic conservative
froh · 6h ago
your point being "classic" (1920s? 1950s?) conservative is "not being big L libertarian"? Because in the other reading of classic, "typical" or "pike", big L libertarian is (1980s-2000s) peak "conservative".
is the Cato institute without the novel anti human rights anti environment spicing?
0xbadcafebee · 10h ago
Lobbyists are responsible for all of the harm that Americans at large come to. Eco damage, car crashes, toxic chemicals in food, the drug war, wars in the Middle East, lack of public housing, the world's most expensive health care, union-busting, even heart disease. If you can think of it and it hurts lots of Americans, lobbyists were behind it.
Scoundreller · 9h ago
We need some anti-mosquito lobbyists. That’s an environment disaster I can get behind.
Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.
> Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.
No, it doesn't happen because you can't make money out of that. So there's nobody to pay/hire the lobbyist.
Same reason why there's hardly research into new antibiotics. It's hard to make money on those as they tend to cure. Chronic diseases and their subscriptions to suppress symptoms, that's where money is to be made
unanonymousanon · 9h ago
I think this takes too much responsibility off the politicians swayed by lobbyists and the corporations paying lobbyists. Don’t get me wrong, lobbyists have been middlemen in a lot of disastrous policy, but they’re not really the source of the problem.
tim333 · 1h ago
Corn ethanol as a car fuel looks espeically bad if you compare it to solar generation on the same land area. You get ~200x car miles per acre with solar electric vs corn and combustion engine.
joak · 10h ago
Agriculture is bad for biodiversity. The raison d'être of agriculture is to favor few species over all others. The goal of agriculture is to reduce biodiversity.
Please keep agriculture for food.
Simple molecules like ethanol can be produced with electricity, water and air (CO2 capture). No need to sterilize a patch of land for that.
Besides I'm not sure ethanol is much needed, electric cars do not burn ethanol.
tjwebbnorfolk · 10h ago
We've known for decades that it requires more energy to produce corn ethanol than is delivered in the ethanol produced. A lot of the necessary inputs are petroleum-based. This is not news.
What MIGHT be news is that the environmentalists who have been pushing biofuels as a "green" alternative to oil have finally figured out this basic physical fact.
adrianN · 7h ago
It is my understanding that environmentalists never pushed for biofuels at scale. Biofuels make sense at a very limited scale where you use waste to produce fuel, eg pressing sawdust into wood pellets, or making biogas from manure.
daemonologist · 8h ago
Biofuels in the US were mostly motivated by a desire to reduce oil imports ("energy security") and were a bipartisan misstep. The original mandate (7.5e9 gal/yr) was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed during a Republican trifecta, and was later expanded to 3.6e10 gal/yr by a Democratic congress in 2007 (still Bush - part of his "Twenty in Ten" energy security goal [0]). That said, reducing greenhouse gas emissions was definitely seen at the time as a benefit as well.
Yah. There's some reason for ethanol in the fuel mix. Having the ability to do it at some scale is good for security purposes, and it helps tailpipe emissions.
But that's a lot less corn-derived ethanol than we currently make/burn.
rpcope1 · 8h ago
> There's some reason for ethanol in the fuel mix.
Uh, maybe from a "we can grow our own fuel perspective", but I've never seen a car run better on E10 or E85 than E0. Basically everything (including the newest and fanciest engines) runs like ass if you've got ethanol in there (and now you have to contend with your fuel having a component that's hydrophilic, which is a huge problem in and of itself, and brutal on natural rubber). Some things specifically built for ethanol as the primary fuel might be OK, but E10 is kind of a travesty.
We'd have been better served just working more towards synthetic gasoline and biodiesel (and I'll make a strong wager that there's still going to be a lot of gas/diesel powered stuff 20-30 years out, and we're going to be going back to trying to get good at synthesizing fuel).
lazide · 4h ago
It does have higher octane than gasoline, so with the right tuning it can run in higher compression engines and be beneficial, even offsetting the lower caloric density.
It usually requires an ECU flash though.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 10h ago
Nah I've been wanting hybrids for over a decade.
It's just that agriculture conglomerates get what they want because everyone thinks farmers should get whatever they want
sukhavati · 4h ago
I always thought that trading precious topsoil for motive power when oil does just fine was an insane premise. Too bad not enough people recognize this for what it is. Biomass is another issue that I find grossly inappropriate.
dragonwriter · 8h ago
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car.
It would be worse because is food is also fuel. Whether motor vehicle fuel or animal fuel, the corn goes through pretty similar chemical change. Obviously, burning just the produce of fields that uptake as much carbon as their produce releases is better, in net carbon terms, than doing that plus burning fossil fuels.
kazinator · 10h ago
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
Because, doh, you would grow orders of magnitude more corn than you would just for food or feed.
Also, if you simply take away food corn, using all corn for nothing but biofuels, a substitute has to be found for food/feed uses of corn.
Food-versus-fuel reasoning about corn in the context of determining whether it is climate-friendly basically doesn't hold up. It leads to absurdities like contemplating whether biofuel from an inedible plant is better for the earth than biofuel from one that can instead be eaten.
randcraw · 9h ago
“ spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.”
Ourselves? Soylent Green for cars?
harvey9 · 8h ago
'Idaho Transfer'?
justlikereddit · 2h ago
The public wants to be mislead by dumb-ass feelgood statements about how green something inefficient and expensive is.
foobarkey · 3h ago
If the carbon has been stored 1 million years ago and you burn it the total net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases
If the carbon was stored last year and you burn it the net amount of carbon stays about the same YoY
Moving the transport sector over to the latter carbon or electrical would be a good direction in general
Disregarding spidy senses and mental gymnastics about people starving if they dont eat all that corn, I dont understand how we fail to see this as a net benefit and crap articles like that get produced
wffurr · 2h ago
>> If the carbon was stored last year and you burn it the net amount of carbon stays about the same YoY
The accounting for biofuels is not that simple in practice. They end up significantly more carbon intensive than using electricity and batteries or even hydrogen.
whatever1 · 7h ago
Just because you can drive 2’ and casually get 100 liters of gasoline does not make fossil fuel infinite. People forget that oil is not like air.
We waste a ton of resources for drilling, transporting and refining, creating in the process huge externalities, to ensure reliable production and supply. And it will only get worse as we are running out of easy to tap sources.
Looking for cheap and viable alternatives to fossils is not a conspiracy or a game. It’s an absolute necessity.
lazide · 4h ago
The issue with corn ethanol is that while it could* be done without fossil fuels, it isn’t actually.
Which is why it is such a scam, actually, because in theory it could be done that way, but it’s cheaper to inject fossil fuels at every stage, and hence isn’t actually green. It was also done before electric cars were a thing, and now the whole thing is a pretty pointless give away to the ag industrial complex.
meindnoch · 5h ago
Corn is just a very inefficient solar panel.
scotty79 · 5h ago
But a pretty good battery.
meindnoch · 4h ago
Human-made batteries are much more efficient. Pumped hydro storage is more efficient. Heck, even electrolysing hydrogen from water has higher roundtrip efficiency than burning ethanol made from corn.
cpursley · 3h ago
Just wait until you learn about the crazy stuff like corn syrup, “fortified” highly processed white bread and sugary kids cereal they’ve pushed for the last 40 years. There’s a reason the farm bill tackles both ends: Farm subsidies and SNAP - American taxpayers are literally subsidizing the obesity health crisis.
khelavastr · 10h ago
Keeping dollars in the USA and away from petrstates certainly isn't an understated benefit.
Scoundreller · 9h ago
And in the petrostate up North, Canada, we’ve required 10% ethanol (and possibly going up) in our gas…
But we don’t grow enough corn to do that and therefore 60% of the ethanol is imported from USA.
Kinda a weird dependency to create as a petrostate.
ashoeafoot · 3h ago
This article is just state propaganda which wants artificially dumped food prices (otherwise riots) decoupled from arbitrary energy prices
anonym29 · 10h ago
I know the general public should never be expected to subsidize enthusiasts, but E85 - available in many places for under $3/gal - has many of the same performance characteristics as $20/gal race gas for performance automotive enthusiasts.
I'm all for the peaceful and orderly dissolution of the entire US federal government, as involuntary taxation under implied threat of violence is theft, but until then, thanks for the deeply discounted race gas, fellow taxpayers!
IrishTechie · 5h ago
It's been a long time since I dabbled, but from memory the likes of E85 is good for fixed load use (eg. drag racing) but not great for variable load (track racing cars, motocross etc) because petrol has a wide range of evaporation points compared to the much narrower range of E85.
Take Brazil, for example. Their ethanol program is fundamentally different. It's based on sugarcane, not corn, and it has a spectacular EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of about 8:1. That means for every unit of energy put into producing it, eight units are returned. By contrast, U.S. corn ethanol barely breaks even, with an EROI around 1.3:1 to 1.8:1.
Brazilian ethanol also sidesteps many of the land use and food diversion issues that plague U.S. biofuels. Sugarcane is mostly grown on degraded pastureland far from the Amazon, and it doesn’t displace staple food crops. Plus, the leftover biomass (bagasse) is burned to power the refineries themselves, making the process close to energy self-sufficient.
The Brazilian model shows that biofuels can work—but only under the right agricultural, environmental, and economic conditions. The U.S. corn ethanol lobby essentially hijacked the "green energy" narrative to push something that mostly benefits Big Ag subsidies and corn states, with questionable climate gains.
So yeah, skepticism about biofuels is warranted—but we should be careful not to throw out the good examples with the bad.
Where the carbon comes from matters.
When you burn gasoline all of the carbon emitted is carbon that until we took the petroleum it was in out of the ground had been out of the atmosphere for millions of years.
When using gasoline on an ongoing basis the result is a large net increase in atmosphere carbon from burning the gasoline, plus whatever similarly old carbon is emitted during the processing of the petroleum into gasoline.
When you burn ethanol that was made from corn all of the carbon emitted is carbon that was in the atmosphere until the corn took it out of the atmosphere to use in photosynthesis.
When using ethanol from corn on an ongoing basis there is no increase in atmospheric carbon from burning the ethanol. There is just an increase from whatever old carbon is emitted in the process of growing the corn and turning it into ethanol.
But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss.
All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.
This doesn't make any sense to me. With petrol, you are transferring carbon from a store to the atmosphere every time you use it for energy. With a wetland, you only destroy it once (thus releasing carbon from the store) the first time you use it to produce corn. Every time after that you're capturing carbon (in corn) and then releasing it again (when burning the biofuel).
Yes, it's an oversimplified analogy (there are many more subtleties such as the amount of carbon in wetland vs corn, the carbon requirements of the production and retail process of petrol vs biofuel, etc.). But even if we made the model more complex, it's still fundamentally two entirely different scenarios. One is just a continuous release from carbon stores while the other aims to restructure a carbon store so that it can release and capture in a cycle.
The point is that biofuel production isn't carbon neutral. Maybe it could be theoretically, but in practice it takes energy inputs in the production process like in the fertilizers, processing of crop into fuel, and transport/distribution, which makes it net positive for atmospheric carbon.
Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions.
> When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation occurs. This process eventually leads to the formation of deep peat deposits, which can accumulate for thousands of years.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44246-024-00135-y (first search result for wetland carbon sink)
Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon in the charcoal resulting from forest fires isn't sequestered any more than the same carbon in the forest when in its un-burned state. The only difference is that, once you have a forest fire, a lot of the carbon is also just released into the atmosphere as CO2 in smoke.
Show me the megatons/year of charcoal being produced by the worlds forests eh?
We could process them yes, but we can also just make them into timber - or burn them for energy. Or just bury them somewhere under a bunch of clay. Oh, and now we’re back to this thread.
If what you thought was true, imagine a forest sitting there for millions of years. Where would this permanently sequestered carbon be going? Soils do not become unboundedly thick.
https://ijw.org/wild-carbon-storage-in-old-forests/
That the hydrogen currently comes from natural gas is no argument it must come from natural gas, any more than cars currently using petroleum derived fuels would imply they must use petroleum derived fuels.
The key point is that biofuel replaces fossil fuel. Meaning, instead of having a system that inputs carbon into the environment, you have a system that recycles carbon already in the environment.
It's impossible to argue against this is a significant and unequivocal improvement.
The points you raised were about corn-based biofuel. Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass, and how it would be the primary crop driving biofuels. I feel like framing biofuels as a corn-based crop is a red herring.
> All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, (...)
Yes, including those from fossil fuels.
I hadn't heard "switchgrass" since GWB mentioned it in his State of the Union years ago. Did it end up becoming a significant source of biofuel?
It doesn't counter it. At best, it plays on a fallacy that burying the lead only leaves the red herring as argument.
But corn-based biofuel is a red herring. Try to understand it.
Your blend of argument is the same type of strategy used to denigrate electric cars, where complaining that the fact that electricity can be generated from coal is this major gotcha. It isn't. It's one of many ways to generate it. There are others, and the end result is always better for the environment.
But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
When we produce this much electricity from solar, without fossil fuels, we'll also save 40% of water withdrawals. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
By about 20 years ago we understood that this was nonsense, that farm equipment and transportation infrastructure for corn cultivation chugs diesel, that somewhere between half, all, or twice (depending on study) the fossil fuels saved by corn ethanol would be burned to produce it.
Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel suck. Sugarcane ethanol works with high EROI. WVO biodiesel is almost pure profit. There were suggestions that cellulosic ethanol (switchgrass, miscanthus) and algal biodiesel could be productive enough to be worthwhile, but they have not taken over, and subsidy has been directed consistently to boosting existing corn producers in order to win the Iowa Caucus.
Other crops are more efficient
(Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
The trouble with humans is that they aren't very good at moderation. As soon as they see a little opportunity to do something good they take it to the extreme, to the point that it is no longer good.
The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some studies) or not even (in others) produce more fuel than you burned.
If you electrify your farming you don't have this problem. A far-future use-case is that we have eliminated 95% of fossil fuel use, and use solar-battery-powered tractors, trucks, and combines to harvest biofuels in order to fuel long-haul aviation and certain other legacy hardware that proved difficult to electrify.
Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral.
Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon.
Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon.
But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
No they do not. The accounting generally doesn't take into account the full emissions of agriculture, which for corn is particularly carbon intense. Not to mention the downstream pollution impacts of over fertilization, such as coastal dead zones
To get 1J of biofuel-based fuel, how many J of fossil fuel is burned? If it’s like 0.9J then you really have to ask how much carbon is released when turning carbon sinks into farmland, because it will take many many crop cycles to recoup that from biofuels.
That is why we started producing corn-based ethanol. It wasn't intended to see people grow corn for it, but rather clean up the unmanageable excesses realized in the due course of growing it for food-based reasons that otherwise would have been left out to rot. In that vein, J is insignificant as it is spent either way.
The problem is that humans aren't very good at moderation. A little ethanol production is quite sensible, but once humans get it into their head something might be sensible in small doses they have to take it to a ridiculous extreme... You see that in everything.
you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
then the correct approach would be
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for *burying in the ground* and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
unless i am misunderstanding these two comments? some clarity would be great!
It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into ethanol, and leave the fossil fuels out of it? (* of course current agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels itself, so the math isn’t that simple. For it to actually work, we’d need to ensure the entire vertical was fossil fuel free)
Of course, it’s a lot more direct and effective to use electric vehicles, near as I can tell.
Instead, this article is a master class in the red herring fallacy. Every person on the 'wrong' side of the issue has their sordid past and connections exposed, whether it's their association with Wall Street or the fact that they're a sex offender. Nevermind the science, the author just assumes that because the reader (presumably) has a certain political persuasion denigrating the other side will serve as a convincing argument.
If you find the excerpt underwhelming, go read the book. I will warn you that in some ways it feels more like a memoir of Searchinger's life than a book on land use considerations, but, despite that, it still does a great job of showing how land use is still not being accounted for in all situations.
I finished Eating the Earth last week and found it rather interesting to read.
... and be overwhelming underwhelmed?
https://unece.org/media/press/372591
It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.
What is your argument?
https://spectator.sme.sk/culture-and-lifestyle/c/new-documen...
Burning pellets as Bioenergy is renewable - it's just not sustainable[1] or climate-friendly.
[1] not sustainable in large scale use.
Biofuels rarely make sense, unless we can get the biomass as a side-flow from some other process. And that kind of flows are quite limited compared to our energy needs.
Trees grow again. They are renewed.
What is this junk?
Ah, end eventually trees will not regrow, because they need soil for that. And water. Modern forestry is far from renewable. Only externalities having a longer time-frame to kick in are conveniently ignored by the decision makers and the masses willing to see only the upsides.
Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest. The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The land used is not free; it could have instead stayed a forest and remained a carbon sink. When you compare wood pellets using for generating energy and compare it to other forms of energy generation it no longer holds up as a renewable resource after you take into account the land that could have been kept instead as a forest and carbon sink.
This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil.
Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning.
The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 year old range, because that is when the bulk of the actual growth is occurring.
Renewable doesn’t mean ‘indefinite carbon sink’. Renewable means ‘renews’.
This entire discussion is incredibly ridiculous.
"In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests, published in Nature in 2023, WRI researchers using a biophysical model estimated that annual wood harvests over the next few decades will emit 3.5-4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. That is more than 3 times the world’s current annual average aviation emissions. These wood-harvest emissions occur because the great majority of carbon stored in trees is released to the atmosphere after harvest when roots and slash decompose; as most wood is burned directly for heat or electricity or for energy at sawmills or paper mills; and when discarded paper products, furniture and other wood products decompose or burn. Another recent paper in Nature found that the word’s remaining forests have lost even more carbon, primarily due to harvesting wood, than was lost historically by converting forests to agriculture (other studies have found similar results1). Based on these analyses, a natural climate solution would involve harvesting less wood and letting more forests regrow. This would store more carbon as well as enhance forest biodiversity."[0]
[0]https://www.wri.org/technical-perspectives/wood-harvest-emis...
And the original paper that introduced the idea of land use https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1151861
But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.
That f'ing with one species.
Now imagine the impact of f'ing with the forest itself.
Could the capacity to sequester carbon be affected by second or third order effects?
Any co2 released by harvesting a forest, is very shortly taken back up again by the forest regrowing. Within a lifetime for sure.
Trees are nice, I get it. But this is all in the noise.
The US emits a truly massive amount of fossil carbon. [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...], “Total emissions in 2022 are 6,343.2 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent”. Yes, that is 6 billion metric tons of co2 equivalent a year. 6 trillion kg. Or about 20,000 kg per person in the US, every year.
Currently (since ~ 1990), US forested land is estimated to offset ~ 13% of fossil co2 emissions. Forests cover 36% (!) of US land area, and have been slowly increasing since ~ 2000.
Farmland covers another 39% of US land [https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Censu...].
Pretty much all the rest is either 1) waterways, 2) cities, 3) non-arable land like steep mountains and deserts with no ready source of water.
So even with a back of the envelope, easy math, if we changed all our farmland to grow forests, we’d roughly double the amount of carbon we could sequester - which would still be ~ 25% of the amount of fossil carbon we’re emitting, every year.
And then we would still need to DO something with all that wood, because burning it or letting it rot just releases all it’s co2 back into the atmosphere.
And we’d all starve to death in the meantime.
The (very common) thinking that forests are ‘sinks’ (aka it goes in one way and stays) or like a petrochemical reservoir (we can put it in, or take it out - but it stays there once in, or out) are a big part of the confusion.
On a geological timescale, carbon being stored in a forest is a temporary and rather rare circumstance. Some global percentage will always be in vegetation (see carbon cycle), but any given atom will move around a lot.
Harvesting forests and burning them, takes carbon that was in the atmosphere, then in wood, then puts it back in the atmosphere. Total carbon in the atmosphere was only temporarily out of it in this situation.
If we wanted to permanently take it out of the atmosphere, we’d need to bury all those trees (deep enough where they won’t decompose and/or the decomposition products won’t make it into the atmosphere!). Turning it into furniture or building products is a more useful, but shorter term solution.
One idea-logically most pure solution would be to puree them and inject them into old depleted oil fields, eh?
Because otherwise those trees will just burn, die and decompose, etc. - it’s inevitable.
Ideally they would be replaced in a shortish timeframe by new trees or growth, roughly locking up the same amount of carbon. But that doesn’t always happen.
And people aren’t allowed to clear cut forests in the US (generally) anymore. Most (all?) US timberland is multi-generational new growth now at this point, and is harvested using as realistically healthy a process as possible. If we had battery powered industrial equipment, it would be even better.
I’ve read the papers, and I’ve done the math many times.
The amount of carbon being released by burning the trees, is roughly the same amount as was taken out by them growing. That’s the nature of it. When they regrow,they’ll take more out.
That is the nature of being renewable. Unlike fossil fuels, where chances are no more will replace it naturally.
Complaining about someone cutting down the trees, specifically from a ‘renewable’/‘total carbon’ perspective is silly in this context. The carbon released isn’t even fossil carbon, and will be back in the trees soon enough - less than a lifetime!
And I’ve done the math - even if we turned all of the arable land in North America into forests, based on the USDA data from National Forests, it would take 4-10ish years worth of growth to temporary store 1 years worth of fossil carbon being released just by the US right now.
Every year.
And to even try that, we’d all starve, because we turned all our crop land into forests too.
Worry about the massive quantities of fossil carbon still getting sucked out of the ground. That is what is feeding the impending disaster.
Unless people are salting the earth and stopping further growth (which generally is already forbidden in the US!), cutting down and burning a forest is a temporary nudge in the accounting that will self correct.
Generally most of it will get used in lumber though, which means it should net decrease atmospheric carbon until it rots or burns in a fire. If landfilled, it could go thousands of years.
In summary - the math doesn’t actually check out when you look at it over realistic timescales, and this is more an ideological thing than an actual real thing. I love trees. But they aren’t going to save us from this mess, no matter how hard core we go.
This is why you can't ignore land use changes in carbon budgets. It's a sound argument, it's not ridiculous at all.
Furthermore Europe can also choose to replant non-forest land or replant permanently afterwards.
Crops can be rotated.
Trees can be non-clear cut when harvested.
None of this changes the definition of renewable.
[note] depends on the biome, part of said discretion
So when a building association finds themselves having to replace the old furnace, given that getting a new coal furnace is now illegal, the pellets are seen as the reasonable, if not wonderful alternative.
And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
I do want to note though that corn is possibly one of the least useful crops to subsidize, it is one of the most robust and predictable food crops we grow, which is why so much of it is grown despite a large fraction of it's energy going into worthless stalk. More delicate crops that have larger and less predictable yield swings, like wheat, or something with delicate fruits that can't be stored long, likely deserve the majority of subsidization money that currently goes towards corn.
And on top of that, many Western countries routinely dump their overproduction on Africa, where as a result of all that free aid, local food production industry has all but vanished. Up until the '00s, Simbabwe was known as "Africa's corn chamber" - that is long gone now.
Plant X food, get X food?
Absolutely not! Even with irrigation, there are years with drought, yes even in the West. There are years that are too cloudy, or too sunny (yes, too sunny is a thing). There are years with locusts, and no insecticide doesn't completely solve that. And regardless of global warming or not, some seasons have always been worse for hurricanes, tornadoes, and some events at harvest time can wipe out crops entirely!
Outside of all of the above, few nations feed themselves on their own output. External food production can wither and vanish in an instant, whether through war, or inclement weather too.
You must overproduce to ensure a continuity of food supply. It's the same reason that fallow farmland must be a thing, too. There must be extra, there must be a safety net.
Only people who have never starved, never been truly hungry would espouse such things.
And that swings both ways. Last year, with the stars aligning just right, the corn yields around here were ~100 bushels per acre higher than even our most optimistic pre-harvest estimates. That is an incredible amount of unexpected extra product. Corn especially has a huge, unpredictable yield band.
Which, of course, is exactly why we started producing corn-based ethanol. To buffer the periods of uncontrollable excess — where the previous alternative was to see it rot away.
As for too much corn, it's a purely economical plan: There's rotation with soybeans in most of the midwest because corn-corn-sobeans is more profitable and treats the land better. Your typical farmer would change to anything else that makes more money per acre, especially if it needs fewer treatments.
As for the total acreage, corn is the second highest in land coverage. There's a worse one: Lawn grass. It just sits there, requires a bunch of maintenance, and produces no economic output. It's often also mandatory: My county's minimal ratios mean 75% of my property has to be well maintained lawn
While not circled around to properly destroying a wetland for farming, is also destroying a far more permanent carbon sink than a farm.
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IMO the article is tripping over itself to tell a story and cares about that story far more than factual information.
It could even help for some types of people, even if it's likely painful for the people reading from here.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1151861
"These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years"
Also, most corn (and soybeans) is for animal food anyway. Very little of the corn grown in the US is for human consumption.
My understanding(not a corn farmer but have watched a show by one on youtube) is the farmer will harvest the corn then dry and store it, selling over the course of a year or two, the ethanol plant is sort of the fallback option when they need to get rid if it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSB-8dn3CkI
Personally, I am in the rapeseed bandwagon. Ethanol is not a very good fuel, better to be growing bio-diesel
Yup, just as a point of reference, something like 70% of Illinois corn goes straight into Illinois hogs.
Farmers growing corn for ethanol are growing broke despite subsidies. The program is an environmental disaster because people in the Mississippi River basin should be growing anything except corn because corn is a crop that requires huge imports of nitrogen fertilizer which burns fuel and leaches into the environment and creates a huge dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico.
Farmers make much better money from agrivoltaics, if they can convert 10-20% of their land they can produce a huge amount of energy and spare the fertilizer, it is not a one-way trip, the solar cells can be removed in the future and in the meantime it supports a more diverse ecosystem. People have no idea what a win-win it is.
Here's a breakdown by sources (2023)
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Interesting take though, I'm not saying that growing corn is best way to "produce stored energy", but in your comparison it's almost like direct competition to for PV + batteries of any sort.
For example, say it costs a supplier X per year to safely eliminate a negative externality (e.g. local air pollution) that would otherwise cause a percentage of consumers to form a negative opinion of the brand and shift to competitors. Now say it costs Y to purchase a level of control of information flow (news, PR, which are naturally commoditized) that could mitigate said negative public opinion. If Y < X, an economically rational (but ethically unscrupulous) actor would choose the second avenue.
For anyone who had heard of them the program seemed pretty transparently a way to put a fig leaf on an extra subsidy. Big agriculture may not have spoken accurately about the programs but I doubt they succeeded in misleading anyone. Maybe in the states receiving subsidies, no firsthand experience of the marketing there.
It is not that hard to understand. It is possible that studies were tweaked to support another narrative, but farm subsidies always serve strategic interests.
Using synthetic e-fuel for all USA domestic flights would use 85% of USA’s electricity generated.
Powering UK flights on plant-based biofuels would use >50% of its agricultural land
2⃣ UK waste oil is already spoken for, used in soap, cosmetics etc.
But it’s far short of what would be needed anyway.
Instead we will import ‘waste’ from places like Malaysia, which also happens to be a major palm oil producer (worse than diesel for warming).
3⃣ Synthetic e-fuels use lots of electricity.
Using renewables doesn’t make it ok.
That’s because, until we fully decarbonise, it diverts renewables from reducing the burning of gas & oil, worsening climate change.
4⃣ UK Gov isn’t pushing crop-based bio-fuels, but other nations are, like Singapore.
These have high emissions, because they lead to forest destruction. They also threaten food shortages, with warming already hitting crop yields—and ecosystem collapse.
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/sioldridge.bsky.social/post/3luwjfr...
One of the main issues with switching to biofuel is it costs way more than regular. Mandating an expensive way to make it won't fix that.
If we went for full size nuclear reactors, though, I doubt we would need more than half a dozen more in the UK.
https://www.withouthotair.com/
A lot of the calculations are back of the envelope, but I guess provide a ballpark estimate.
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-musk-doge-havent-gone-...
is the Cato institute without the novel anti human rights anti environment spicing?
Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.
lobbying https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
No, it doesn't happen because you can't make money out of that. So there's nobody to pay/hire the lobbyist.
Same reason why there's hardly research into new antibiotics. It's hard to make money on those as they tend to cure. Chronic diseases and their subscriptions to suppress symptoms, that's where money is to be made
Please keep agriculture for food.
Simple molecules like ethanol can be produced with electricity, water and air (CO2 capture). No need to sterilize a patch of land for that.
Besides I'm not sure ethanol is much needed, electric cars do not burn ethanol.
What MIGHT be news is that the environmentalists who have been pushing biofuels as a "green" alternative to oil have finally figured out this basic physical fact.
[0] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/stateoftheunion/...
But that's a lot less corn-derived ethanol than we currently make/burn.
Uh, maybe from a "we can grow our own fuel perspective", but I've never seen a car run better on E10 or E85 than E0. Basically everything (including the newest and fanciest engines) runs like ass if you've got ethanol in there (and now you have to contend with your fuel having a component that's hydrophilic, which is a huge problem in and of itself, and brutal on natural rubber). Some things specifically built for ethanol as the primary fuel might be OK, but E10 is kind of a travesty.
We'd have been better served just working more towards synthetic gasoline and biodiesel (and I'll make a strong wager that there's still going to be a lot of gas/diesel powered stuff 20-30 years out, and we're going to be going back to trying to get good at synthesizing fuel).
It usually requires an ECU flash though.
It's just that agriculture conglomerates get what they want because everyone thinks farmers should get whatever they want
It would be worse because is food is also fuel. Whether motor vehicle fuel or animal fuel, the corn goes through pretty similar chemical change. Obviously, burning just the produce of fields that uptake as much carbon as their produce releases is better, in net carbon terms, than doing that plus burning fossil fuels.
Because, doh, you would grow orders of magnitude more corn than you would just for food or feed.
Also, if you simply take away food corn, using all corn for nothing but biofuels, a substitute has to be found for food/feed uses of corn.
Food-versus-fuel reasoning about corn in the context of determining whether it is climate-friendly basically doesn't hold up. It leads to absurdities like contemplating whether biofuel from an inedible plant is better for the earth than biofuel from one that can instead be eaten.
Ourselves? Soylent Green for cars?
If the carbon was stored last year and you burn it the net amount of carbon stays about the same YoY
Moving the transport sector over to the latter carbon or electrical would be a good direction in general
Disregarding spidy senses and mental gymnastics about people starving if they dont eat all that corn, I dont understand how we fail to see this as a net benefit and crap articles like that get produced
The accounting for biofuels is not that simple in practice. They end up significantly more carbon intensive than using electricity and batteries or even hydrogen.
We waste a ton of resources for drilling, transporting and refining, creating in the process huge externalities, to ensure reliable production and supply. And it will only get worse as we are running out of easy to tap sources.
Looking for cheap and viable alternatives to fossils is not a conspiracy or a game. It’s an absolute necessity.
Which is why it is such a scam, actually, because in theory it could be done that way, but it’s cheaper to inject fossil fuels at every stage, and hence isn’t actually green. It was also done before electric cars were a thing, and now the whole thing is a pretty pointless give away to the ag industrial complex.
But we don’t grow enough corn to do that and therefore 60% of the ethanol is imported from USA.
Kinda a weird dependency to create as a petrostate.
I'm all for the peaceful and orderly dissolution of the entire US federal government, as involuntary taxation under implied threat of violence is theft, but until then, thanks for the deeply discounted race gas, fellow taxpayers!