U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline
reuters.com
reuters.com
The rest, which would be usage for e.g. corn bread or other staples of North American cuisine, is of course fine. Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. It's a crop that does well under a wide range of circumstances and popular for that reason all over the world. And as a grain, it's an important part of food production.
So, why does this exist? Very simple, federal subsidies to states that have become very dependent on that. Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful.
[1]https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-sche... [2]https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-production-by-state/
(Not an expert, just a resident)
New Hampshire has the first primary. It's a state law.
This farmer faked his paperwork and got $1.6 million in illegal farm subsidies.
https://thecounter.org/man-found-guilty-stealing-1-3-million...
is growing corn a destructive activity on net? If it is, then we shouldn't just be cutting subsidies, we should be banning it outright. As it relates to this discussion (ie. "are republicans hypocrites because they're anti individual welfare but pro agricultural welfare"), we can safely assume that republicans don't think that and therefore aren't hypocrites. This is not to say whether growing corn is actually destructive or not, only that the republican view is at least self-consistent.
You'd be wrong. Farm subsidies exist in several forms, but one is for letting fields that could produce x lying unused. Some "farmers" just sign up for that program every year and havent planted anything since they inherited the farm.
Rule 12 Timing of the Delegate Selection Process
No meetings, caucuses, conventions or primaries which constitute the first determining stage in the presidential nomination process (the date of the primary in primary states, and the date of the first tier caucus in caucus states) may be held prior to the first Tuesday in March or after the second Tuesday in June in the calendar year of the national convention. Provided, however, that the Iowa precinct caucuses may be held no earlier than 29 days before the first Tuesday in March; that the New Hampshire primary may be held no earlier than 21 days before the first Tuesday in March; that the Nevada first-tier caucuses may be held no earlier than 10 days before the first Tuesday in March; and that the South Carolina primary may be held no earlier than 3 days before the first Tuesday in March.
This is what created "Super Tuesday", which is evidence of a race to the bottom that has gone as far down as it can go. It also shows that 4 states were carved out probably as favors (does anyone know more here?). In order to change this, probably a bunch of people who are being treated favorably now will get upset at losing their privilege, and no one in leadership wants to crack that egg. Seeing as that South Carolina, one of the favored states anointed to hold a primary before before Super Tuesday, played such a decisive role in the nomination of Joe Biden, I think the practice of keeping these states first is going to continue for the foreseeable future.
Jim Clyburn of S. Carolina is widely credited of resuscitating Joe Biden's candidacy after his sad start in IA, NH, and NV. He placed a distant 4th in IA, 5th in NH, and Bernie blew out NV with 40% of the vote. At that point, Clyburn endorsed Biden, and Biden ended up winning SC. Then a bunch of candidates dropped out of the race before Super Tuesday (some who were doing much better than Biden overall) and support coalesced behind Biden.
If anything, the slow roll of IA, NH, SC and NV allows the party to calibrate the primary process. If things start going a way they don't like, they can make quick changes like asking a bunch of candidates to drop out of the race (I'm not saying Bernie would have won had they not done this, I'm just pointing out it was obviously done, and what enabled them to do this was the fact that all primaries are not held on the same day).
Probably not favors but codifying the status quo to get their endorsement on the rule. That said, I agree that it gives some states more power, but isn't completely useless. It allows the party to test how good candidates are at getting out the vote And adds some option for course correction.
I am a rare Iowan in that I recognize that this system is dumb, and bad for the country. It's great for me - I have had the privilege of hearing in person in a small group setting every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter. I've talked with a couple of them. I can tell you from personal experience that Joe Biden's reputation as a "hands on" or "physical" campaigner was spot on - he embraced me as firmly and as intimately as any man every has (I am very rural looking, white male nearly his age, for the record). But for all that, the circus that is the Iowa caucuses is a stupid way to start the candidate selection process. I'd be happy to see the back of it.
The influence of big states within the party because of electoral votes is pretty small. The state's electoral votes are applied by the citizens of the state. I mean, yeah if you could get 50+% of Texas's voters to credibly promise to vote for the presidential candidate of the party that had an earlier Texas primary they would compete hard for it. But in reality, they're going to vote for the republican nominee. Same logic for California but for the democratic nominee.
Imagine if South Carolina was pushed to this one delegate system in 2020. Bernie Sanders was nearly the nominee and South Carolina began his death spiral. If South Carolina was taken out of play by activists in the state, then either the party would have to forgo its own rules or accept that Bernie would have continued his massive momentum coming out of Nevada.
Likewise if on Super Tuesday Buttigieg and Klobachar would not have dropped out at (supposedly) Obama's instance and backed Biden, then Bernie would have emerged much stronger. One way they could have blunted his momentum is if they saw polling early enough that Bernie was going to take a big state like California, we can't rule out the California machine pushing itself to lose the electoral votes in an effort to stop Bernie and then maybe change back its timeline after the election.
Iowa's own laws have screwed Iowa. State law mandates the caucus occur at least eight days prior to any other state's proceedings (similarly, NH law mandates they be the first primary election). The DNC and RNC might also like it that way, but both states are complicit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) Yes, it's a book. Highly worth the time it takes to read to make the point in full.
So once we've put all the farmers out of work and declared success, what do you suggest they do that is "more productive"? Should they lease their corn fields to crypto bros?
I have seen farms near me do Corn, Corn, Corn, Soy, Corn based on whatever they think will be most profitable.
I don't know about the current landscape, as it has been years since I've lived in the states, let alone mingled with farmers in the US, but at one point, they would pay farmers to allow a field to be unplanted. I find this to be a viable option when mixed with the above and the farmers I knew didn't complain either.
*Corn and soybeans are generally grown together, generally (but not always) in alternating years. Corn tends to deplete nutrients in soil, soy puts them back.
So what you’re saying is that the market doesn’t work?
I definitely do not back unregulated markets, and in general, do not think markets for food work. It isn't just food, but other things that are general necessities for the modern times. Utilities, roads, and medical care are other examples.
I don't think anyone arguing that subsidies in general are bad, just that subsidising corn is bad...
It doesn't have to be some extreme shut down, it can be a transition to something better for society.
And "better for society" is... well, not a given. I don't know enough about farming to know what sorts of beneficial crops can be grown where corn/soybeans grow well and I'm not optimistic enough to think we won't just use the "new and improved" crop in much of the same abusive ways that we use the corn crops. I'm going to guess that we could make animal feed for confinement farming out of something that isn't corn We could probably make a sweet syrup out of it, too, and I'm guessing the main benefit to people is that they've made corn syrup the absolute villian and swept away nuance surrounding it, and would welcome the new replacement without much though.
We just need society to be a bit better, I suppose. Quit confinement farming livestock and have better animal welfare laws, for example. Make healthy eating very cheap (and easy with premade food too), have a sugar tax of sorts and food laws to keep sugar out of unexpected places and reduce sugar some other context. Oh, and probably expand public transport exponentially. Feed, corn syrup, and biofuel dependence should drop.
The Dutch government is actually paying farmers to stop farming. Nitrogen emissions are a big problem in densely populated areas and cattle farming is a known big contributor to that. So, they are paying farmers to get out of the business of converting subsidies into manure. The main point is not to keep them farming but to stop them from doing harmful things. If they can farm other things in a less harmful way; great. But otherwise, things like forests, nature reserves, etc. are also valuable to have. Nothing wrong with subsidizing farmers to create those.
This amount of corn is simply not needed and it never was. It only exists because of the subsidies. So, maybe grow stuff that is not contributing to destroying our planet and is actually worth something without a lot of subsidies. Organic farming seems pretty lucrative lately. Iowa has plenty of that happening already. There are plenty of things farmers can do that are actually needed that are much less harmful.
"Just because you've always done things this way does not mean it is not incredibly stupid."
So, yes change is hard. But we need to change and this is kind of an obvious change to make. If we wait for the FDA to conclude that corn syrup is bad for you, we can indeed wait a long time.
So, don't wait for them and adjust their priorities at the federal level. That's what governments are for. You can't expect these agencies to do reasonable things by themselves when they are obviously stuck protecting the very unreasonable status quo. Bloat is the problem both in these agencies and the obese citizens whose interests they are supposed to protect.
There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.
Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.
Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers.
This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.
The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production. It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years. Then let huge swaths of American farmers go bankrupt as you scale back production. This was the basic model hundreds of years ago, they still had famines.
Alternatively you can push productivity while paying pay farmers not to produce anything on their land. This keeps them from going bankrupt and requires fewer resources than excess production. We used to do this, it reduces the risk of famine because productivity can be scaled up quickly.
Finally you can just massively subsidize production and dump the excess on foreign markets, this is really bad for other countries and costs insane amounts of money and still results in excess production even as everyone gets fat. This is where bio fuels come in.
PS: There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business.
Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it.
"It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years."
Any data to back this up? This is a huge volume. Freezers capable of those temperatures are expensive and consume a lot of energy.
"The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production."
I think farm subsidies need to be changed or reduced, but for a slightly different reason. We are basically subsidizing other countries. A lot of our grains get exported, basically sending the fruits of those tax dollars overseas.
It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other.
> Any data to back this up.
The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc.
The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.
Commercial freezers are also frequently built with vacuum-insulated panels[1] which have very low thermal conductivity.
It's not crazy to build something very large, like a grain silo, to hold dried grain at a low temperature. That seems fairly plausible as a way to reliably "turn off" subsidies over time.
It sort of reminds me of the strategic oil reserve[2] in the US. Similar idea (boring holes in the earth cheaply via using water to etch into giant salt deposits)
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_insulated_panel
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
A bushel of corn is 56 pounds. Assuming a very high 1lb of corn per person per day only gives 2 * 365 * 330 million / 56 * 1.25 = 5.4 billion cubic feet.
Which still sounds insane except AT&T Stadium in Dallas is 0.1 billion cubic feet and cost only 1.3 billion to construct while including all sorts of stuff we don’t need. So roughly one building that size per state. Even if it was almost that expensive vs a more realistic 1/10th, the cost of corn + ethical subsides would hit that in roughly a decade and we would could then spend a 1 billion a year cooling the things while saving money.
PS: Having just one building would look cool but would be a massive single point of failure. Also, you can store dry corn for quite a while even in non cryogenic conditions.
If all food trucks and restaurants disappeared off the face of the earth, people would mostly be able to feed themselves. The same is not true for farms.
Because people at the top need other people making them money rather than revolting.
We can't? Where's the famine? News to me. Last I checked we still have way more food than we know what to do with (massive worldwide fertilizer shortages and inflation notwithstanding).
By the way, not all children's books are equally naive. We've recently found a nice one [1] (in German) which shows small- and large-scale farms side-by-side, in a brutally honest way (including butchering).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/340775816...
In case you just want to practice German with media for children, I always recommend "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1]. It's a mix of short animated stories with "how it's made" features, where they go filming in factories etc.
Either way, we have several examples of local "peasant" farms, some organic, that do well.
Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money.
I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary for the commercial portion, maybe with some log and block grown mushrooms. Then the rest would likely be for personal use. Obviously the major costs like the initial land and health insurance would come from savings, so it would be mostly supplemental income to an already solid retirement plan. I don't think it will happen though.
I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community. Maybe because we're tired of building some intangible thing or some app that nobody really needs, and want to have a physical job with meaningful produce.
A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.
Hehe reminds me of a volunteer day I set up for our team. They wanted to work on a farm that's part of the food bank. We spent maybe a half a day picking greens and squash. Most of them couldn't believe how "physical" it was - commenting about it being a workout or being tired.
Or until they stop producing and need to become beef in order to make room for the next generation of milk producers.
Not really, there are different levels of profitable. Some extremely efficient operations can be profitable at scale, but no one is getting rich.
The places like you describe (have half a cow from one in my freezer now, from just outside Chicago) operate on marketing to upscale customers via advertising/co-marketing deals at fancy/local restaurants.
They also operate a number of farmers markets booths at about a half dozen markets in the city each weekend, and that is both a marketing and sales angle. This is where they pick up a large amount of their weekly subscriptions, and folks like me who order half a cow each year.
> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community.
I agree the idyllic dream sounds pretty great. However I'd suggest trying to not jump feet first into it. My parents were organic market garden farmers (one of their specialities was mushrooms), and if you need to at least break even your job will look far more like marketing/sales with a bunch of back-breaking physical labor in between than farming or gardening. Animal husbandry is just as involved with the bonus of random emergencies popping up at inconvenient times.
The successful farms in the space tend to focus their time on the "business side" of the operation, and have the standard hired help the large farms have to actually run most of the farm itself. If you've ever visited a "small farm" that did weekend tours this is typically the model they are utilizing.
At "hobby farm" level it can be pretty relaxing if you have no need for the income itself, and don't mind putting good money after bad towards equipment to make your life easier. I've seen these operations work out, but lots of times these folks have an extremely hard time integrating into their new community and tend to move on in a few years.
Just trying to provide a different perspective. Farm life is hard, and involves long hours for very little financial remuneration. I'd only even consider doing it as an absurdly over capitalized hobby.
As a retirement "job", it could provide supplemental income. That's my goal.
If I'm not doing that, then what am I doing? I hate my job and don't see anything better. At least I could be physical rather than squander my health like my job requires now. Maybe make some money to cover hobby expenses, or use the land to save money by growing stuff for myself. Otherwise, I might as well sit in front of a TV in some suburban house while eating myself to death.
I don't doubt it is a big drive, but wouldn't the military take the biggest portion of that cake?
The idea that e.g. hybrid rice is going to solve world hunger is absurd.
Sustainable farming is good, but I don't think we do very much of it. I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...
it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have and how much % of the GDP you're willing to pour into it. I'm sure you can sustainably feed all 8 billion people if we poured 50% of our GDP into food production and we only ate rice and beans.
Not just oneself, but entire nations. Scarcity of resources have historically been a major cause of wars. I don't see the world coming to a consensus on lifestyle any time soon.
False; you can feed 8 billion people using small scale / non-industrial farming as well, it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.
You say that like it's a small thing. Keeping most of the population out agriculture and allowing them to produce other goods and services is the primary benefit of the agriculture industry.
> But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.
Less than half of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol production. Most of it goes towards feeding people - either directly or indirectly. If we include other produce, then the vast majority of the agriculture industry's output becomes food.
I thought that was only true in poor and developing countries but that large industrial farms in highly developed nations produced way more than everybody else. Have you a source you could share as this is a very interesting point?
[0] https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-ac...
We could contribute a great deal more to feeding the world, and doing less damage to the environment and our health, but alternative uses for much of the land that is in corn in the US.
Conventionally, talking heads seem to indicate the right way forward is to use tech and industrial agriculture to support 20bn+ on the planet. Seems totally doable, but at the cost of losing the natural environment as well as more natural food sources altogether.
Anyway, I say get us back to around 5bn people and keep it there.
Malthusians in 200 years will say 50 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
(Not to say it's only Africa by any means, but you do have to go quite a ways down the list before you hit a non-African country).
Sure anything can be done "democratically." But politics is the art of the possible...
Sugarcane is the opposite, it grows easily (too easy in fact, it has tendency to spread in an unwanted way), doesn't require too much diesel to produce, and it makes a fantastic amount of ethanol when pressed.
https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/10748100434957967...
Curious, what is the signifier of "organically farmed" here - what benefits does it provide, how does its usage significantly differ of "non-organically farmed" corn?
Like what? The article says that the land would otherwise be conserved, ie not productive. Some of it might even be developed.
Because it gets taxpayer money for no reason
Farm subsidies take various forms such as tax preferences, import tariffs, and a USDA organization specifically tasked with manipulating crop prices. https://www.usda.gov/ccc
Do that, though, and you can run a turbocharged engine at much higher levels of boost and create much more power than you would be able to do with anything short of race gas or even more exotic and dangerous fuels.
They didn't.
> corn syrup to be universally bad
The research is still out about whether HFC is processed differently in the body. What isn't really up for debate is the pervasiveness of HFC in everything. Because it's subsidized and so cheap, it excess has made it a cheap raw material that's found in just about everything from Tomato Sauce to Bread.
Too much sugar in your diet is bad, and so it isn't much of a stretch to say that having a ridiculously cheap source of sugar that's being added as filler to every imaginable product is probably not great for us.
> and for some reason declaring that "organic" whatever that means today, makes something better somehow
I think the op was trying to say that corn is a hearty crop that grows fine on it's own without a lot of petrochemical fertilizers.
You're jumping to a lot of conclusions.
For you, maybe. Not for the millions of rural Americans whose livelihood depends on agriculture subsidies. There's a reason why we have the Senate, a place where Nebraska has the same power as California. It's exactly for situations like this. The US is a massive country full of competing interests, and our founders knew that eventually the urban population would massively outnumber the rural population, leading to a tyranny through rule of the majority. So states were put on equal footing in the Senate to give the rural populations a voice. And because of that, the Senate will never ever allow these subsidies to be cut. There's simply too much support for it among the rural states.
The defense industry would like to have a word with you. There are certain industries that the government props up solely to maintain the capability in times of crisis. I would argue that ensuring an adequate capacity to generate a self sufficient food supply is important enough to meet that bar.
Also, there is no way the US subsidies of food and billion pounds of cheese in cold storage etc etc have anything to do with a defence justification, it is pure corruption and zombie subsidies top to bottom.
Thinking about the geopolitical strategic layer of ag policy is fascinating!
It was never intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Producing it requires more energy than it provides, and this was known long before it was introduced. It might be possible to power the production with renewable energy, but that's just extra steps for powering cars with renewables.
The bill introduced many things, some efficiency regulations and investments in new tech were aimed at climate change. When he introduces ethanol, he specifically calls out diversification of energy supplies and reduction of imports and not carbon.
I don't remember much of a climate pitch at all. Everyone immediately pointed out that it cost more energy than it produced. The pitch to the public where I lived at the time was national security (energy independence), and of course the demand it would generate for the local corn industry.
There was probably some greenwashing of it going on, but I certainly don't recall much.
How can that be? Are you including the solar energy? Well, in that case, every process out there has a less than 100% efficiency, so the claim may be true, but also vacuous.
If you don't include the solar energy, then are you saying that all the energy used to make the fertilizers, to plow the fields, then harvest them, then brew the corn and distill it, is less than the energy content of the ethanol produced? I heard this type of argument before, but I find it really difficult to believe. For example the study [1] claims you need 140 gallons of fossil fuel to plant/harvest/process one acre of corn that will produce 328 gallons of ethanol. Ethanol is less energy dense than crude oil (30 MJ/kg vs 42), but overall, 328 gallons of ethanol has about 67% more energy than 140 gallons of crude.
[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2001/08/ethanol-corn-faulte...
I am definitely surprised it's a positive number when combined with modern carbon-intensive agriculture practices. Learn something new every day!
Either way the sentiment at the time was very much "rah rah america" vs. "save the planet", but that could certainly be my quite fallible memory.
It didn't work but it was advertised as part of an effort reduce oil usage and especially to reduce dependency on OPEC following the fuel shock in the 1970s. Growing up in the 1980s, the “brighter future” vision was that someday you'd drive a synthetic-fuel vehicle which used no oil at all.
He took the money from the cornfield lobbyists back to CA to study contaimination of the water supply by MTBE from leaking underground gasoline storage tanks.
MTBE is not nearly as toxic as gasoline hydrocarbons, which naturally include hydrocarbons like benzene which is a significant part of crude oil to begin with. Pure MTBE has undergone therapeutic studies also in gram amounts to no ill effect, but it does have a characteristic sweet sharp ether odor which is so much easier to smell in faint amounts than the hydrocarbons.
As such MTBE had actually been detected by residents in some CA water wells where gasoline had possibly been leaking for years and nobody knew until after the Clean Air Act of 1990 required oxygenated gasoline, after which MTBE became the oil companies' choice.
MTBE had been established as an octane booster in the early 1980's but not many oil companies had a chemical unit to make it. They consumed all they made, usually in their premium gasoline. It really did bring back a certain driving pleasure that you only get as your octane approaches 100. Being an oxygenate though you did get fewer miles-per-gallon but not nearly as bad as ethanol. Either way these were cleaner-burning additives to conventional gasoline.
Anyway in 1987 CA company Atlantic Richfield (now part of BP) went commercial with their advanced engineering process, built a big unit and started making more MTBE than they needed themselves. Others followed suit, some startups. Lots of MTBE was made from refinery gases like butylene, combined with purchased methanol and there were constant shipments of MTBE as a commodity of its own. The methanol was made from natural gas as raw material so ultimately the source of all gasoline was still oil & gas wells.
Ethanol didn't have much of a seat at the table, or shall we say a position at the feeding trough. Ethanol was always an alternative EPA oxygenate when the 1990 regulations started requiring oxygenates, however it was not as cost-effective, often requiring subsidies but their lobbyists were fierce out of necessity.
API could be considered asleep at the wheel by comparison, they've always been raking in the bucks, well they have subsidies they don't even need so there is that.
MTBE plants just cranked it up for the occasion.
Eventually gasoline leaking into an aquifer becomes easier to detect than ever.
A comprehensive examination was made of the CA water supply by leading experts and MTBE was found in a number of water wells, but amounting to only a very small fraction of a percent of the water supply and then only an extreme trace amount. The final verdict from the experts was that there really was no significant threat to health from the MTBE overall in California water. This is more of an anti-pollution government than you usually see, and they really tried to find something much more damning but that was it.
Davis mandated Ethanol anyway and banned MTBE in the process. A couple other states ended up following suit, and then the whole US with the nationwide RFS. Ag lobby is like no other.
Davis was recalled for other reasons but that made the way for Schwarzenegger.
Ethanol "helpfully" makes it so people are far less likely to complain about any gasoline leaking into their local water, so less action needs to be taken there, and it supports the corn industry which was Davis' main objective anyway. Smoke & mirrors are well-practiced government tools for obscuring financial shenanigans in plain sight, the same approach can be applied to environmental discrepancy.
2. Many people, AV, boats, powertoys, lawn equipment (it's own pollution there but that's another article) dislike ethanol in gasoline, especially for older cars.
3. Who wins in the end? The corn farmers for the past, 17 years?
4. Why did it take 17 years for this study to be funded and published.
5. If it's economical to move back to "pure gasoline" will we? Just using pure gasoline means we are 24% more efficient on carbon:
"The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion."
Simply incredible, back in 05, it was one a gas shock, gas used to cost $1.25'ish on average and went up quite a bit, $3 or so - https://money.cnn.com/2005/09/01/markets/gas_prices/index.ht... and that was in 2005 dollars. Average car MPG got 14-22mpg.
6. This was not new, even back then everyone knew: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-etha... but not exactly how it was 24% more intensive then gasoline.
But, yeah, it's definitely not on the path to a carbon neutral economy.
You get a lot of benefits from European-style government, like socialized medicine. But then you also have to pay those taxes.
Taxes are just one factor in the price.
[1]: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-s...
Where allowed by the special interests, and only so far as it supports those special interests.
I have to wonder if everyone who likewise owned a hybrid or EV knew that there was a chance some child in the Congo was mining the cobalt used to manufacture the batteries.
Unfortunately I don't believe we live in a perfect world. Every solution to climate issues just seems to shift the problems elsewhere. Success is declared when the issue disappears over the horizon.
I have no idea about brazilian gasohol, but that’s basically the story of french nukes, they were motivated by geopolitics and economics (the 1974 “messmer plan”, the plan actually led to overbuild as electricity demand did not pick up anywhere as much as expected), but resulted in french electricity being one of the least carbon intensive in europe if not the world, and basically only beaten by countries with ubiquitous hydro.
Central claim: "Their revisions most profoundly reduce predicted land use change (LUC) emissions, for which they propose a central estimate that is roughly half the smallest comparable value they review (figure 1). This LUC estimate represents the midpoint of (a) values retained after filtering the predictions of past studies based on a set of unfounded criteria; and (b) a new estimate they generate for domestic (i.e. U.S.) LUC emissions. The filter the authors apply endorses a singular means of LUC assessment which they assert as the ‘best practice’ despite a recent unacknowledged review (Malins et al 2020 J. Clean. Prod. 258 120716) that shows this method almost certainly underestimates LUC. Moreover, their domestic C intensity estimate surprisingly suggests that cropland expansion newly sequesters soil C, counter to ecological theory and empirical evidence. These issues, among others, prove to grossly underestimate the C intensity of corn-grain ethanol and mischaracterize the state of our science at the risk of perversely affecting policy outcomes."
Now, we'll subsidize growth again, but then regulate the greenhouse emissions on the other.
It is one thing for government regulation to address externalities (good). It is another to address externalities that government helped create in the first place!
(Though not as an alternative)
Who paid for this research?
My theory is that the automotive industry is complicit in not fighting back against ethanol mandates because they know that it’s ultimately good for business if their cars last 10 years instead of 15.
Ethanol has many downsides, especially with attracting water into the fuel, but it does have its benefits, too.
[0]https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ask-mr-green/does-premium-...
I wonder if the epa mpg ratings tests use ethanol free gas?
Now they all mark up ethanol free gas.
The only solution is to make neighborhoods more walkable, reduce the need for frequent travel through mixed use zoning and invest in public transit (trains and trams, buses if you can't avoid road traffic completely) so more travel happens in high density vehicles rather than cars.
But that basically means public spending for public services rather than having companies sell more products to consumers and that's just too much like communism to be a legitimate answer because you don't want people to reconsider whether some aspects of socialism might actually be good.
EDIT: Since HN won't let me reply, I'll just pre-empt any further replies by pointing out that the problem with "solutions" like renewables, carbon capture and electric vehicles is that while they sound great in a spreadsheet they ignore externalities, overhead and scale: yes, if we could wave a magic wand and convert all existing cars into electric and backfill the increases energy demand by turning all the now unused infrastructure into wind mills and solar panels and somehow fix the energy storage problem, the situation would undeniably be better than it is now. But that's not how we get there and even that situation would be unsustainable as long as we follow a growth mindset and promote individual transportation as a consumer product rather than addressing infrastructure as a social issue.
I don't think HN is ready to acknowledge that the biggest carbon emission savings in the US don't come from carbon capture tech magic but from offloading the more emission heavy parts of the production chain behind the curtain into third world countries that don't end up on the spreadsheet. We're not going to solve climate change by stuffing all our toys into the broom closet with hopes that the regulators can't see the mess we made. We need to actually clean up the mess and stop adding to it. We can't fix a resource problem by continuing to expend an increasing amount of resources. It's called "reduce, reuse, recycle" because those are the things you can do in decreasing order of effectiveness. Carbon capture is just recycling. Going electric is not even that.
Lithium mining isn't great for the environment, but it's certainly much less of a problem than co2 emmisions.
Was it measured?
And the co2 eeded to produce your car's batteries I do not know, but probably several years for that too.
So I doubt your daily driving is carbon neutral just yet.
By reducing the size and weight of the cars we use gives more than relying on magic new innovations. We use 2000kg cars to drive around a < 100kg person.
If we with the snap of a finger replaced all the coal and oil and gas we use with wind and solar power plants I'm not convinced that would be much better. Not maybe worse, but not better.
Wind mills everywhere, solar plants covering huge areas of land and a lot of metals and energy needed to construct all that. It just moves the problem around.
A small gasoline/diesel car is better than a big electric car. Or why not a small electric car such as this Citroen Ami or Zbee from Clean Motion:
https://www.citroen.fr/ami Or https://cleanmotion.se
Saving and reducing quickly now gives more than hoping for the new fancy technology being in place in 10, 20 or 3 years from now.
For example, you can't even make a car without a rear view camera now and sell it in the US. Why? Is looking out the back window really that challenging?
Apparently, otherwise children wouldn't keep getting run over and we wouldn't need backup cameras.
If you used to deny climate change was happening, then denied it was a problem, then denied it was human caused, then denied that there was any alternative and so on, then your opinion now is still some kind of progress towards objective reality.
If on the other hand, you started with the consensus reality of qualified scientists and have now regressed into this opinion which seems just like negative energy directed at necessary change then that's a bad thing.
The former seems more likely though, or maybe that's just the optimist in me.
* It makes muscle cars slower
* It is terrible for engines, no matter what the lobbyists tell you
* Ethanol plants smell
* Corn uses a ton of ground water, depleting the Ogallala Aquifer and destroying habitats
* Using diesel fuel to harvest corn which makes ethanol... is just stupid. You'd be better off just burning the diesel in cars.
* The EPA was successfully paid off to implement Ethanol. They should be held accontable.
I think the only sharp resistance is going to be Nebraska, but generally, everyone hates it and it needs to go.
The exact same analysis is true for electricity generated from a nat gas fired generator vs. simply using the nat gas directly, especially for heating. This is why "banning nat gas for new construction" is so ignorant and stupid!
- Ethanol effectively helps spread carbon emissions across a larger area. It significantly cleans the air around large cities, I guess at the expense of more emissions in rural areas? But then again I'd guess most of those rural areas are not super concerned about carbon emissions and are very supportive of corn subsidies.
- Of the three goals of adding ethanol to gasoline, it seems like 2 of 3 of them are completely successful: "The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports."
It's also an absurd notion. Leaded gasoline to this still poisons the air of all 50 states in the form of 100LL avgas. Suggesting that a wasteful farming practice is saving us from lead is like shooting one foot off and the exclaiming that you "saved" your other foot.
I'm no expert on fuel mixtures but currently it does even if there better/worse alternatives.
> Suggesting that a wasteful farming practice is saving us from lead is like shooting one foot off and the exclaiming that you "saved" your other foot.
You are making an nonsensical generalization from a single study. This isn't black on white. Not all ethanol are corn ethanol and this is an industry that sees operational improvement year by year.