Biofuels Policy, a Mainstay of American Agriculture, a Failure for the Climate
(insideclimatenews.org)81 points by rntn a day ago
81 points by rntn a day ago
BEV - Battery Electric Vehicle
(just in case it's not obvious)
Are you aware that by having agriculture directly integrated inro the fuel/electricity market, you have ai compete directly against people for basic survival neccssities?
You might be replying to the wrong message; I was just providing the acronym's definition.
Wouldn’t it technically be “the use of AI complete directly…” a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.
> “ a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.”
In fiction. What you’re saying is in a fictional scenario designed to benefit humans, this would happen. What in the history of this earth would make you believe that fiction though?
I would be content to settle for carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline. It is politically viable. But the price needs to be lower. The startup Prometheus is working on this.
BEV are not a serious climate solution unless you are talking about ebikes. BEV also contribute a load of pollution to waterways via tire wear. ebikes are cheaper to purchase and make a significant change.
They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
Last time I checked, a Tesla 3 (a small car by NA standards) weighted 1800kg. That's twice the weight of my 1987 VW Jetta and very close to that 2T you mention. The weight issue is real; it affects the driving dynamics and makes the energy problem worse in many ways.
Why not both? Ebikes are obviously highly useful in cities, but not so much for longer distances in the countryside, also problematic in winter up north. There will always be need for private car ownership for areas that can't be effectively served by public transport (and obviously public transport itself should also be electric powered).
Just electrify everything and let people choose what mode of transport fits their needs and wallet. I barely use my car in city, but absolutely need it to visit my relatives who do not live within reach of public transport.
Because resources are finite. Subsisdies and household income invested in Electric cars would have a much greater benefit if put towards ebikes. Most car trips are short and could be replaced with ebike trips (and that's without any infrastructure change). Leave long trips to gas cars that already exist.
For public transit, rail should be electrified because it has lower maintenance requirements and better acceleration. Trolley busses are great for similar reasons (and noise). Battery busses are a horrible idea, expensive and not yet reliable. Transit agencies are replacing diesel busses with battery because of lower emissions, and at the same time reducing frequency of service, making public transit less usable and less used -- encouraging personal vehicle use.
90M light vehicles are sold globally every year. As long as consumers demand cars, BEVs are the most climate friendly cars to sell them. Anyone saying “don’t buy cars!” is living a pipe dream.
China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.
(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)
Ebikes might have more positive impact, but that doesn't matter unless you can convince a critical mass of people to use them instead of their cars. I say this as someone who thinks ebikes are cool, but that's absolutely not going to happen in any significant way at least in the US. Replacing a gas car with an ebike requires a significant shift in your lifestyle, which most people either can't or don't want to do. The benefit of a BEV is that you can mostly use it exactly like you use the gas car you already have, with some added benefit of being able to "refuel" it at home while you sleep. Changes that people actually adopt are at the end of the day the most impactful ones.
Duh. It was never meant to actually be good for the climate. We USians just wanted to point more subsidy money domestically (particular at farmers, the target for virtually every non-kinetic subsidy for decades) instead of using MBTE, which was IIRC mostly of Canadian manufacture.
The sensible way to do biofuel is biogas from cattle. It doesn't slot so neatly into the car network (car needs to be modified to have a gas tank (why the heck do you call petrol gas, you nation of fools??)), but actually lowers the climate footprint of cattle farming even before considering the petrol that would be burnt instead of it: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and eventually burns into CO2 in the atmosphere, so it's better to burn it in an ICE.
Dairy farmers would never do this. The cost of LNG and methane are far, far too low to justify the costs of digestors, collection and infrastructure. Gasses are waste products that are usually vented to the atmosphere, even in the oil industry. They're dirt cheap.
I worked on a project to make a useful biomass from chicken shit. In the end, after years of research and viable product, it was axed because the upfront costs would always be too high for chicken farmers to adopt it.
The only way to get dairy ops on board would be to mandate it with regulation and then subsidize it. Cattle and dairy ops are massive welfare queens who resist change in every way they can, unless that change is more welfare.
We can't even get landfills to stop leaking/venting methane. No chance we get dairy ops to build methane capture systems.
What I meant was we should collect methane to use as fuel in cars. It happens a bunch here in Finland, and driving a biogas car is totally feasible. At some point the government stopped incentivising biogas refueling stations in favour of foreign dependency-riddled and rare earth metal-laden electric cars, which sucks a lot. I think it's pretty significant that you can make an old car basically carbon neutral, instead of buying a Chinese child labour spyware battery on wheels.
Again, American dairy farmers would never adopt this without massive subsidies. Even then they would fight it like they do every environmental regulation(of which there aren't many). If they can't increase profits they will not do it.
Finland is not the US. Americans will try everything else before doing what other countries do because we believe we are different/exceptional.
I agree it's a good idea. It just isn't feasible in the United States for a variety of reasons.
Turning solar power into something we use to destroy the environment doesn't strike me as very "green" at all. Quite the opposite. I can't imagine it's a very efficient use of money, either.
Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.
In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.
We could also just feed the food to people who want to kill us and maybe they'll want to kill us less.
Leaded gasoline hasn't been a thing for decades now.
Except in general aviation, where lead free alternatives are just coming out of the approval pipeline.
You literally proved Forge36's point. Ethanol is the replacement for lead in gasoline.
Unleaded gasoline was unleaded long before ethanol was added. So, no, I didn't prove his point.
This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.
It was great for farmers though.
iirc it is scientifically possible to take corn stover and convert it to bioethanol with net negative carbon emissions.
BEVs powered by PV use two orders of magnitude less land than ICEVs burning biofuels.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
yes I'm aware. in that era, which was last i tracked this field, BP had a pilot plant that reached commercial and greenhouse breakeven, but then they lost the deepwater horizon case and scuttled their biofuels research, I'd be surprised if no one caught up. did no one catch up?
There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
It was great for large investor backed farmers who bought out their neighbors via debt, leased expensive John Deere equipment via debt, and are now trapped.
No word about cutting down whole rain forests (ie on Borneo or mainland Malaysia) just to have more biofuels? I've seen those endless fields of that palm monoculture where almost nothing else lives from above and in person, and also how proper rain forest next to it looks like, it was a very depressing view.
"Deforestation" is also known as economic development, when someone is not trying to disparage a third world country. Malaysia and Indonedia, with their relatively stable politics and governance, gained a lot of FDI in the 1970's and started developing rapidly. Rainforests were cleared, true, and initially the land was planted with rubber, because that's was the most profitable crop that grows well in this climate. Then rubber price crashed, so the farmers switched to oil palm, the next most profitable crop.
There is no intrinsic link between biofuel and deforestation. If coffee is the most profitable crop, then you'd see an endless sea of coffee plantations in Malaysia. Would you want to ban coffee then? Okay you banned coffee, so cocoa now is the most profitable crop, so you banned cocoa. Now pineapple is the most profitable crop, so forth and so on.
The logical conclusion is that when you try to "save the forest", you are saying that a country has no sovereignty in developing its economy and exploiting its resource to enrich its citizen. "You should stay poor, because I say so".
The palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia are targeted at human consumption - palm oil is the primary cheap cooking oil across Asia, and demand is high.
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
The perfidious outcomes of viewing climate change as a "business opportunity" rather than an urgent crises is making things worse
There are the obvious effects outlined here
There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy
We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn
What a waste
Because just about every country is greenwashing "Energy Security" as "Alternative Energy".
Countries that are supporting BEVs are those countries that have slip capacity to other fuels (renewable AND coal) and rare earth processing, just like those pushing for Hydrogen are those with alternative sourcing supply chains for biofuels and coal, those pushing for continued ONG usage have plenty of access to refining capacity, and those continuing to push for biofuels have the ethanol processing capacity.
The brutal reality is large countries can eat the financial and humanitarian cost of climate change easily, but those worst affected live in countries that cannot. There is a moral case to be made for multilateral climate engagement, but NatSec will always trump morality.
Chinese population's 1.4B number has only been supported by the Chinese government. Many have suspected that it's now around 1.1B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM57HhM8yV8, after covid deaths and overcounting by local governments. That's why the malls in Shanghai and Beijing are completely empty at this point.
Also, the US consumer market is 4X that of China.
Instead, why don't you tell us what your point actually is?
Over 1.6% of the contiguous USA is dedicated to corn ethanol. If that land were replaced by solar, at 20% capacity, it could produce 10.8 PWh of electricity. That’s two and a half times the total amount of electricity that the US currently produces per year. Biofuels produce the equivalent of ~ 0.4 PWh.
1.5% of land area dedicated to solar can produce enough to meet all global energy needs (not just electricity), according to this article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01754-4
The easiest fix might be pushing for faster adoption of BEVs. Nobody can easily take subsidies away from farmers.