Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels
lithub.com
lithub.com
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.
probably hundreds of years if erosion wasn't a thing [0]
but "regenerating" as the OP types is probably about actively managing land recover while planting some sugarcane in between the process. now. if the harvest will be profitable for making biofuel is probably another talk
[0] just a guess
Basic reason would tell us, unless we're using a nitrogen-fixing plant like beans, unless we're using fertilizer, the plant's gonna suck up nitrates from the soil, get harvested, and now there's less nitrates in the soil. Weakening the soil quality thusly. Pretty straightforward.
Biologically you could then go on to argue micronutrients along the same lines, with poop and pee more likely to contain those things, since aminals also are eurkaryotes so probably depend on some of the same
I vaguely recall campaigns against turning Amazon into pastureland via slash and burn.
highly productive areas on sugarcane aren't in Amazon [0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bruno-Santos-52/publica...
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.
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?
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.
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.
As a corn grower myself, I wouldn't go that far. Ethanol production is really only profitable when corn isn't profitable to grow. In other words, when you have ethanol plants champing at the bit to buy your corn, you are wishing you hadn't grown it in the first place! It can be a profitable crop, but only on the backs of food buyers who are much less price sensitive.
Ethanol does serve as a helpful buffer to step in when corn would be otherwise worthless, where the alternative is to let you see it rot, minimizing the losses — But if you are counting on ethanol to make you rich... Good luck!
Granted, there was that strange period around the early 2010s, in reaction to the early-to-mid 2000s where corn was being left to rot, where the US government was paying ethanol producers to produce ethanol. If you are posting from a time machine from that time, I get what you are saying. But those days are long behind us now.
What I'm not saying is you need to bury the corn to use biofuels.
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.
It was just meant to be a humorous hyperbole in agreement with the parent but seems like folks didn't get it.
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.
But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.
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.
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.
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 works fine in the lab, but there's a lot of engineering that needs to be done in order to scale it up to industrial levels. Some failures are going to happen along the way, and failures at that scale break companies.
That engineering only gets done is there's money in it - and oil's been cheap bar some temporary upsets. So the pilot plants were shut down or converted to biodiesel, which is much less risky.
Once the economics change again, you'll see movement in that area (assuming EV doesn't completely take over).
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.
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.
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.
As for using lumber for timber, when eventually disposed it would have to be turned into charcoal rather than burned for energy or let decompose in conditions that don't sequester carbon.
You also missed the point about using charcoal for soil enrichment.
There isn’t enough room. Let alone equipment.
and it sure isn’t what happens naturally.
> A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
To which I'm stating that forests and wetlands are not carbon-neutral but carbon-negative.
Then you miss the parent comment's context and start in an inflammatory way:
> Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.
And take it somewhere else (move the goalpost) - from whether forests are carbon neutral or not to how effective charcoal creation is at carbon capture, in our human timescale.
Meanwhile the only practical point wrt. charcoal creation from forests was:
> Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Which doesn't propose an effective carbon capture solution. At most it's something like emission reduction - the key phrase is old trees. And soil enrichment.
Recommendation: don't argue against points people didn't make.
> A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
Highlight: *In a long-term equilibrium*. The comment literally talks about long time periods...
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.
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.
Other crops are more efficient
(Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
We don’t grow corn specifically to make ethanol, we grow corn because we can eat it if we lose all food imports. I’d much rather eat cornmeal for years than sugar beets.
Turning excess corn into ethanol happens to be better than burying it or throwing it away.
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.
Poor yield implies high prices. It is not economical for anything but to leave it idle. And, as you'd expect, when corn was expensive a few years ago many ethanol plants did shut down.
For a short while around 2010, following a massive glut of corn through the early 2000s, the US government was paying ethanol producers to produce when corn was otherwise too expensive to work economically in an effort to jumpstart the industry. But those days are long behind us.
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.
If it's half, it may be worthwhile on an energy basis in a narrowly defined sense. But there are far-reaching secondary energy costs beyond this explicit accounting. How do you account for the fuel burned in the jetski that your combine operator uses in his free time, or the cost of forging the steel that went into his combine blades? We live in a global economy and in this sort of analysis, there are probably hidden emissions not noted in the study that make 2:1 EROI insufficient.
There are non-EROI issues as well. What happens if we devote all our land to biofuel production? People starve. What happens if we devote all our land to 10:1 biofuel production and it doesn't cover 1% of current demand?
We have crops with higher Energy Return on Investment, just none (so far) that are economical to produce in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus.
Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is perhaps 5:1.
Daytime, immediate-use solar is something like 30:1. Less when you factor in batteries.
Wind turbines around 20:1.
Hydropower is maybe 100:1.
Oil varies enormously. Used to be, sweet light Saudi crude from the Ghawar field might break 100:1. Most fields globally more like 10:1-20:1. Alberta heavy oil sands are something like 5:1. If you dip all the way down into ultraheavy kerogen fuels, solid at room temperature and demanding lots of processing, there are certainly deposits that are less than 1:1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
There was a bit of an obsession in the mid 2000's with the concept of a global "peak oil" production, limited by supply-side constraints involving all the low-hanging fruit effectively being picked. While this is often dismissed as neo-malthusianism catastrophism, most of the ideas involved are unscheduled eventualities rather than some defined apocalypse. It introduced a lot of people too young for the 1970's OPEC embargo to the concept of energy scarcity, and effectively ironed out a great deal of the discourse using a fairly active forum.
http://theoildrum.com/node/9249
The major errors of that community's consensus were:
A) The particular shape of the Hubbard Peak bell curve is somebody's fit, not related to fundamentals, and extrapolating sigmoid / logistic curves have both huge error bars when the reasoning is sound, and little merit if the reasoning is not fundamentally sound. You simply can't predict a peak well in advance based on inflection points of this wide of a variety of sources, central limit theorem be damned.
B) Natural resource reserve estimates are both highly subjective and something that suffers from game-theoretic problems. If a speculator 'knows' that the ridge on the horizon is probably full of gold, but has an incentive to work the claim he already started a few miles away, he has no reason to report it. The same applies to countries and companies. Honest reserves estimates are also always quoted in terms of "Economically extractable at current prices", but prices can change and dramatically shift the number.
C) While the underlying fracking and injection technologies to expand the horizons of what constitutes an extractable reserve date to the 60's, they were not ubiquitous or as readily controllable until recently.
D) There is more than enough long-tail low-payoff hydrocarbon fuel out there for us to boil the planet in a CO2 oven, unfortunately.
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
Corn is edible, and I’d be more than happy to eat cornmeal for years in the event of a global war that stopped food imports/exports. This is precisely the reason for agricultural subsidies, to ensure our nation can feed itself if all agricultural trade is cut off. We’d grind up field corn and eat cornmeal instead of starving to death with plenty of electricity but no food.
If this was about that, we would grow something else. This is about agricultural lobbiests bribing congress to steal unfathomable sums of wealth from the public through subsidy.
Lobbying can have much higher returns than the 4-6% yield from renting farmland to operators, it’s about food security, not handouts.
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.
I grow corn. I grow it to be sold. Whatever the buyer decides to do with it — be that feed it to animals, turn it into tortilla chips, make sweeteners, create plastic for 3D printers, produce ethanol, or even burn it in their furnace — is up to them.
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.
Not exactly. You wouldn't normally eat "industrial ethanol corn" off the cob, which is what you are probably trying to suggest, but it is often used in other corn-based food like tortilla chips, and, of course, its most infamous use: High-fructose corn syrup.
https://unece.org/media/press/372591
It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.
What is your argument?
Trees grow again. They are renewed.
What is this junk?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
They are really beautiful and important, but they aren’t doing much when it comes to reducing atmospheric carbon anymore.
As ugly as it is, chopping them down (as long as we can stop the wood from rotting/burning/etc) and then having new trees grow in their place does more actual atmospheric carbon reduction.
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.
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.
Burning pellets as Bioenergy is renewable - it's just not sustainable[1] or climate-friendly.
[1] not sustainable in large scale use.
https://spectator.sme.sk/culture-and-lifestyle/c/new-documen...
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.
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?
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.
Crop subsidies, since the 2014 reforms at least, are "fair" to all crops. That does mean that the most grown crops (which in the US is corn, by a large margin) receive the most subsidies, but is that truly poor application and distribution?
Corn does receive the lion's share of the subsidies, but that's because we grow way more corn, because that's what the consumer chooses to buy (either directly or indirectly [e.g. meat]).
That would imply that subsidies give reason to produce corn over a vegetable, which isn't the case. The subsidies are "fair" — even when that isn't the goal.
You are right that corn is cheap, but that's a result of technology and the nature of what it is. It requires almost no human effort to produce. Stuff like vegetables, on the other hand, remain incredibly labor intensive even on the most technically advanced farms. It is a much harder problem to solve.
As compared to virtually every other food, grain is significantly simpler to handle in almost every way from seeding right to storage and distribution. And corn benefits from being insanely high yielding compared to other grains.
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
As a grain farmer, I would want cooler tech first (which, granted, would follow if the money was there). I chose grain farming because it has the best toys.
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"
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.
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)
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.
Battery storage looks practical to smooth out diurnal variation in power supply and demand but doesn't look so practical to smooth out seasonal variations, some kind of chemical storage could be the way.
Food security is the primary reason for corn overproduction and ethanol is what we do with the excess corn instead of let it rot.
One wonders a bit, you take hydrogen and nitrogen to make ammonia. Then you spray that on a field and grow plants to turn it into protein. What if you skip the plant step and convert the ammonia to amino acids directly.
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.
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-musk-doge-havent-gone-...
is the Cato institute without the novel anti human rights anti environment spicing?
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.
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...
If we went for full size nuclear reactors, though, I doubt we would need more than half a dozen more in the UK.
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.
https://www.withouthotair.com/
A lot of the calculations are back of the envelope, but I guess provide a ballpark estimate.
Well, that's (representative) democracy for you. If politicians were off doing their own thing you'd have a dictatorship instead. Being "influenced" (i.e. listening to the people who share their story) is the whole reason you hired the politician in the first place!
Yes, democracy is hard work. Everyone is supposed to be lobbying. That is what democracy is made of. It is your civic duty. But, understandably, most people would rather do something else — like complaining on HN about how those participating in democracy got their way.
That's why not everyone in the world actually believes in democracy. But, whether you like it or not, if you live in a democracy it is your duty to participate in it. Speaking to your representative regularly (i.e. lobbying) to air out your concerns is a necessity. They are not mind readers! If you choose not to, don't expect magic.
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
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.
It's just that agriculture conglomerates get what they want because everyone thinks farmers should get whatever they want
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.
[0] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/stateoftheunion/...
But in normal human fashion we took what is a decent idea at limited scale and thought we could make it an even better idea if we scaled it up to ridiculous proportions. And in normal human fashion, instead of realizing our mistake in not applying some moderation, now we're convinced that what is a bad idea at ridiculous proportions must be eliminated entirely...
But I don't think I've seen many Environmentalist(TM) proposals that were anything less than a wholesale replacement of "fossil fuels" (and other "extractive industries") for all things everywhere.
I miss the good old days when they just wanted to save the whales, before they came to believe they were saving the whole goddamn planet from certain doom.
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.
And the problems start there. Grunwald, adjectives spilling all over his page, needs a thesaurus for "uphill battle." Stylistically, this is a mess.
Style aside, Grunwald implies that maize is field corn and not sweet corn. It actually means both. This is clearly not a well-researched article on ethanol.
Beyond that we see his politics on his sleeve, tying ADM to Watergate. And a misunderstanding of the meaning of "corps," as the "Corps of Engineers" is not "the Army Corps." This is sadly childish. No, that's unfair to children. I've seen better journalism from high school kids.
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.
The problem is that humans don't understand moderation. They heard it makes sense at some small scale and automatically assume it would be even better if we scale it up massively. Now — if you look at the comments here — they heard it doesn't work at massive scale, and take from it that it doesn't ever make sense...
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.
Big agriculture lying about the public benefits of ethanol is irrelevant, food security is more important in the event of a crisis that prevents agricultural imports than any negative externalities of turning corn into ethanol.
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.
Wouldn’t be the first time most people on HN misunderstand an issue completely though.
Ourselves? Soylent Green for cars?
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.
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.
The finiteness of fossil fuels is not an issue we need to worry about right now.
> it will only get worse as we are running out of easy to tap sources.
As it gets worse, we'll just move on to other sources. No problems at all. At least none that would be easier to prevent than to solve.
> Looking for cheap and viable alternatives to fossils is not a conspiracy or a game
No, this is a pure, large-scale corruption conspiracy.
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.
Who?
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!
It also lets the engine run cooler despite burning hotter precisely because of those evap characterisics.
That's not to say there are no downsides. It's less energy dense so you need larger injectors or a higher duty cycle, you get less mileage, it's extremely hygroscopic, it has different corrosive properties, and a different stoich ratio so most vehicles need some amount of modifications and tuning to properly utilize it.
But all in all, it's wildly economical alternative to traditional high performance fuel.