Biofuels Policy, a Mainstay of American Agriculture, a Failure for the Climate
46 comments
·June 15, 2025adrianN
chrisweekly
BEV - Battery Electric Vehicle
(just in case it's not obvious)
ashoeafoot
Are you aware that by having agriculture directly integrated inro the fuel/electricity market, you have ai compete directly against people for basic survival neccssities?
theoreticalmal
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.
paddy_m
BEV are not a serious climate solution unless you are talking about ebikes. BEV also contribute a load of pollution to waterways via tire wear. ebikes are cheaper to purchase and make a significant change.
decimalenough
They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.
Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
speed_spread
Last time I checked, a Tesla 3 (a small car by NA standards) weighted 1800kg. That's twice the weight of my 1987 VW Jetta and very close to that 2T you mention. The weight issue is real; it affects the driving dynamics and makes the energy problem worse in many ways.
rainsford
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.
null
toomuchtodo
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)
Arubis
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.
dehrmann
The part that is useful is there's strategic benefit to surplus food production, and it's an outlet for surplus food.
Forge36
Isn't a large part of ethanol it's use as a fuel additive that it boosts octane and is relatively cheap? Compared to leaded gasoline it seems very "green".
Qem
Most crops beyond sugarcane in tropical areas lack biomass output high enough to compensate the need for fossil fuel inputs and land use emissions.
MangoToupe
Turning solar power into something we use to destroy the environment doesn't strike me as very "green" at all. Quite the opposite. I can't imagine it's a very efficient use of money, either.
Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
asdff
It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.
In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.
Qem
The devil is in the details. Where did the land used to plant it came from? What was there before? Deforestation emits a lot of CO2. Fertilizer needs fossil fuels to be manufactured, tractors and harvesters burn diesel, et cetera.
MangoToupe
We could also just feed the food to people who want to kill us and maybe they'll want to kill us less.
AnimalMuppet
Leaded gasoline hasn't been a thing for decades now.
strongpigeon
Except in general aviation, where lead free alternatives are just coming out of the approval pipeline.
lazide
This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.
It was great for farmers though.
throwawaymaths
iirc it is scientifically possible to take corn stover and convert it to bioethanol with net negative carbon emissions.
rgmerk
There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
pfdietz
BEVs powered by PV use two orders of magnitude less land than ICEVs burning biofuels.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
throwawaymaths
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?
magnuspaaske
There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
worik
Yes
Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.
itsanaccount
It was great for large investor backed farmers who bought out their neighbors via debt, leased expensive John Deere equipment via debt, and are now trapped.
jajko
No word about cutting down whole rain forests (ie on Borneo or mainland Malaysia) just to have more biofuels? I've seen those endless fields of that palm monoculture where almost nothing else lives from above and in person, and also how proper rain forest next to it looks like, it was a very depressing view.
alephnerd
The palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia are targeted at human consumption - palm oil is the primary cheap cooking oil across Asia, and demand is high.
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
worik
The perfidious outcomes of viewing climate change as a "business opportunity" rather than an urgent crises is making things worse
There are the obvious effects outlined here
There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy
We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn
What a waste
alephnerd
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.
aaron695
[dead]
johnfirus
[flagged]
tqi
China's population is also 1.4B, ie 4X that of the US.
johnfirus
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.
mulmen
It’s possible and even reasonable to want both China and the US to reduce their carbon emissions.
johnfirus
I've not seen any famous progressives complain loudly about China and their practices. In fact, the progressives here seem happy flagging my post decrying China.
macintux
Because we (generally speaking) have more influence over U.S. policy than China's. And because decrying China is typically used as a rhetorical technique to absolve the U.S.
mulmen
Your now-flagged post did not specify “famous progressives”. You’re clearly moving the goalposts in service of your political agenda. This conversation is over.
dr_dshiv
Ask ChatGPT what would happen if all ethanol corn farmland were replace by solar panels. Then ask about agrosolar
AnimalMuppet
Instead, why don't you tell us what your point actually is?
pfdietz
His point is probably we'd save 99.5% of the land that is going to make bioethanol.
The easiest fix might be pushing for faster adoption of BEVs. Nobody can easily take subsidies away from farmers.