Is climate-friendly flying possible? Biden administration places a big wager

Agreed.

From TFA: “environmental groups and some scientists expressed reservations about the plan, which would award subsidies based on a scientific model that has previously been used to justify incentives for corn-based ethanol. Studies have found the gasoline additive is exacerbating climate change.”

I’d be very concerned about the higher level impacts of farming for fuels. Specifically what are the total carbon emissions of the farming involved, including losses for alternative land uses. This seems like a cash handout to farmers (aka spending federal funds to boost election chances) that might have the effect of simply moving emissions to another location. Even if the total emissions are somewhat less, one has to wonder how the funds might be more efficiently utilized to mitigate carbon emissions.

EDIT: Interesting article in Nature about the issues with land use for biofuels worldwide: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01711-7

One key section from the article: “Combining biofuel production with carbon capture and storage can mitigate the high emissions, but even then, biofuels have a negative climate balance on a 30-year time horizon.”

For anyone curious, I found this article using Google Bard with the following prompt. I’m not sure if it gave me a real article name or a fake one but when I searched the article name Bard gave me it had a lot of good search terms which led me to the Nature link above.

“Can you summarize for me the scientific literature on the impacts of corn ethanol on climate change? Include the negative impacts of large scale farming of corn for subsidized ethanol. Cite your sources with high quality references, preferring scientific research papers when possible.“

EDIT2: Seems like there are challenges for e-fuels as well. My god we just need to embrace electric trains don’t we. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01032-7