Duh. It was never meant to actually be good for the climate. We USians just wanted to point more subsidy money domestically (particular at farmers, the target for virtually every non-kinetic subsidy for decades) instead of using MBTE, which was IIRC mostly of Canadian manufacture.
adrianN · 6h ago
The easiest fix might be pushing for faster adoption of BEVs. Nobody can easily take subsidies away from farmers.
chrisweekly · 3h ago
BEV - Battery Electric Vehicle
(just in case it's not obvious)
ashoeafoot · 2h ago
Are you aware that by having agriculture directly integrated inro the fuel/electricity market, you have ai compete directly against people for basic survival neccssities?
theoreticalmal · 1h ago
Wouldn’t it technically be “the use of AI complete directly…” a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.
GuinansEyebrows · 47m ago
> “ a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.”
In fiction. What you’re saying is in a fictional scenario designed to benefit humans, this would happen. What in the history of this earth would make you believe that fiction though?
paddy_m · 5h ago
BEV are not a serious climate solution unless you are talking about ebikes. BEV also contribute a load of pollution to waterways via tire wear. ebikes are cheaper to purchase and make a significant change.
decimalenough · 3h ago
They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
speed_spread · 14m ago
Last time I checked, a Tesla 3 (a small car by NA standards) weighted 1800kg. That's twice the weight of my 1987 VW Jetta and very close to that 2T you mention. The weight issue is real; it affects the driving dynamics and makes the energy problem worse in many ways.
rainsford · 2h ago
Ebikes might have more positive impact, but that doesn't matter unless you can convince a critical mass of people to use them instead of their cars. I say this as someone who thinks ebikes are cool, but that's absolutely not going to happen in any significant way at least in the US. Replacing a gas car with an ebike requires a significant shift in your lifestyle, which most people either can't or don't want to do. The benefit of a BEV is that you can mostly use it exactly like you use the gas car you already have, with some added benefit of being able to "refuel" it at home while you sleep. Changes that people actually adopt are at the end of the day the most impactful ones.
toomuchtodo · 3h ago
90M light vehicles are sold globally every year. As long as consumers demand cars, BEVs are the most climate friendly cars to sell them. Anyone saying “don’t buy cars!” is living a pipe dream.
China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.
(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)
dehrmann · 1h ago
The part that is useful is there's strategic benefit to surplus food production, and it's an outlet for surplus food.
Forge36 · 7h ago
Isn't a large part of ethanol it's use as a fuel additive that it boosts octane and is relatively cheap? Compared to leaded gasoline it seems very "green".
Qem · 3h ago
Most crops beyond sugarcane in tropical areas lack biomass output high enough to compensate the need for fossil fuel inputs and land use emissions.
MangoToupe · 7h ago
Turning solar power into something we use to destroy the environment doesn't strike me as very "green" at all. Quite the opposite. I can't imagine it's a very efficient use of money, either.
Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
asdff · 6h ago
It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.
In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.
Qem · 3h ago
The devil is in the details. Where did the land used to plant it came from? What was there before? Deforestation emits a lot of CO2. Fertilizer needs fossil fuels to be manufactured, tractors and harvesters burn diesel, et cetera.
MangoToupe · 3h ago
We could also just feed the food to people who want to kill us and maybe they'll want to kill us less.
AnimalMuppet · 4h ago
Leaded gasoline hasn't been a thing for decades now.
strongpigeon · 4h ago
Except in general aviation, where lead free alternatives are just coming out of the approval pipeline.
lazide · 7h ago
This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.
It was great for farmers though.
throwawaymaths · 6h ago
iirc it is scientifically possible to take corn stover and convert it to bioethanol with net negative carbon emissions.
rgmerk · 5h ago
There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
pfdietz · 3h ago
BEVs powered by PV use two orders of magnitude less land than ICEVs burning biofuels.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
throwawaymaths · 1h ago
> use two orders of magnitude less land
not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)
throwawaymaths · 4h ago
yes I'm aware. in that era, which was last i tracked this field, BP had a pilot plant that reached commercial and greenhouse breakeven, but then they lost the deepwater horizon case and scuttled their biofuels research, I'd be surprised if no one caught up. did no one catch up?
throwawaymaths · 42m ago
this is as much evidence as i can find on the internet that this was a thing, i cant remember where i heard that it was breakeven:
> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel
There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
worik · 3h ago
Yes
Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.
itsanaccount · 7h ago
It was great for large investor backed farmers who bought out their neighbors via debt, leased expensive John Deere equipment via debt, and are now trapped.
jajko · 5h ago
No word about cutting down whole rain forests (ie on Borneo or mainland Malaysia) just to have more biofuels? I've seen those endless fields of that palm monoculture where almost nothing else lives from above and in person, and also how proper rain forest next to it looks like, it was a very depressing view.
alephnerd · 4h ago
The palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia are targeted at human consumption - palm oil is the primary cheap cooking oil across Asia, and demand is high.
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
worik · 3h ago
The perfidious outcomes of viewing climate change as a "business opportunity" rather than an urgent crises is making things worse
There are the obvious effects outlined here
There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy
We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn
What a waste
alephnerd · 4h ago
Because just about every country is greenwashing "Energy Security" as "Alternative Energy".
Countries that are supporting BEVs are those countries that have slip capacity to other fuels (renewable AND coal) and rare earth processing, just like those pushing for Hydrogen are those with alternative sourcing supply chains for biofuels and coal, those pushing for continued ONG usage have plenty of access to refining capacity, and those continuing to push for biofuels have the ethanol processing capacity.
The brutal reality is large countries can eat the financial and humanitarian cost of climate change easily, but those worst affected live in countries that cannot. There is a moral case to be made for multilateral climate engagement, but NatSec will always trump morality.
dr_dshiv · 4h ago
Ask ChatGPT what would happen if all ethanol corn farmland were replace by solar panels. Then ask about agrosolar
AnimalMuppet · 4h ago
Instead, why don't you tell us what your point actually is?
pfdietz · 3h ago
His point is probably we'd save 99.5% of the land that is going to make bioethanol.
(just in case it's not obvious)
In fiction. What you’re saying is in a fictional scenario designed to benefit humans, this would happen. What in the history of this earth would make you believe that fiction though?
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.
(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)
Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.
It was great for farmers though.
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)
> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel
https://www.nola.com/news/business/bp-shutters-biofuel-plant...
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
There are the obvious effects outlined here
There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy
We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn
What a waste
Countries that are supporting BEVs are those countries that have slip capacity to other fuels (renewable AND coal) and rare earth processing, just like those pushing for Hydrogen are those with alternative sourcing supply chains for biofuels and coal, those pushing for continued ONG usage have plenty of access to refining capacity, and those continuing to push for biofuels have the ethanol processing capacity.
The brutal reality is large countries can eat the financial and humanitarian cost of climate change easily, but those worst affected live in countries that cannot. There is a moral case to be made for multilateral climate engagement, but NatSec will always trump morality.