Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels
65 comments
·July 28, 2025tzs
jayd16
Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.
in_cahoots
I read the whole article and I still don't see how Big Ag misled anyone. I may be misunderstanding, but it seems that the author is trying to differentiate between growing corn for food vs growing the same corn for ethanol. I assume the entire reason the lobby exists is that farmers want to grow corn for food and ethanol. But the researcher lost interest before proving anything around there. Maybe ethanol is actually worse, but I didn't see any evidence in this article.
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.
knappe
This is an excerpt from Eating the Earth. The entire point of the book is that when we consider land use, we're not accounting for other uses for that same land (or how other land would be used) because the land, prior to Searchinger's work in the field all calculations did not consider this factor. Even after Searchinger published their work showing the flaws on land use, it was often ignored.
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.
verisimi
> If you find the excerpt underwhelming, go read the book
... and be overwhelming underwhelmed?
sien
The EU does something impressively crazy burning 23 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021.
https://unece.org/media/press/372591
It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.
voxelghost
It's labeled 'renewable energy' (not electricity), if wood pellets are sourced from sustainable renewable forest growth.
What is your argument?
rini17
It requires stringent checking of the source. Which was shown does not happen or with only slap on the wrist.
https://spectator.sme.sk/culture-and-lifestyle/c/new-documen...
knappe
That it isn't sustainable. As Eating the Earth points out, by growing trees to then cut them down again we're not accounting for the cost of using that same forested land for anything else, like a forest which is a great carbon sink. Instead burning wood pellets is considered renewable until you consider the cost of using that land for something else in which case it isn't a renewal resource.
paganel
Because is bs, pure and simple. Typical Brussels re-inventing the definition of words in order to push their political objectives.
petre
What do you think the furniture industry does with the wood byproducts such as sawdust and bark?
burnt-resistor
Corn and most ag subsidies are using taxpayer money for corporate welfare for mostly mega farming consortia with a smattering of medium and smaller farmers, who also can't exist in the rigged market without welfare. 5% of all US land, not just arable land, ALL land is used for mostly cow corn. It's absolute insanity.
And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
lelandbatey
The corn varieties grown for industrial ethanol production are mutually exclusive with the corn varieties grown for human consumption; you cannot use one for the other. They might as well be corn vs soy beans.
somat
Fun fact: corn farmers almost always rotate with soybeans to replenish the nitrogen in the soil.
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
kwk1
> little of the corn grown in the US is for human consumption.
Yup, just as a point of reference, something like 70% of Illinois corn goes straight into Illinois hogs.
in_cahoots
I assumed something similar. But the author presents this as some sort of trump card, as if the agriculture industry was suggesting farmers grow corn for ethanol instead of for food. And then the researcher lost interest before he could be proven right. Maybe he actually was right, but there's no evidence here.
giantg2
I believe they grow field corn for animal feed as well as for ethanol. Technically some processed foods also use field corn. While there are a number of varieties of field corn, I don't believe any are exclusive to ethanol production and could be used in other capacities.
PaulHoule
For years I saw saturation ads for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation on PBS, I found out years that this is the prime beneficiary of the ethanol program.
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.
0xbadcafebee
Farmers could make more money if we subsidized fresh vegetables rather than ethanol, and it would make us healthier.
toomuchtodo
The purpose of the system is what it does. That would not enrich the people and orgs currently being enriched by the subsidies provided for biofuels. The US is farming ~60M acres just for ethanol and biodiesel.
jfengel
People know what a loss it is for the oil companies, and will not tolerate that.
null
PaulHoule
To be fair, almost no oil goes to produce electricity in US although it is still used heavily in developing countries.
gsf_emergency_2
He should have said fuel companies or even gas companies but that's not colloquial I guess
Here's a breakdown by sources (2023)
ars
They should switch to growing sugar cane. There's a high demand for sugar, plus sugar works even better than corn for ethanol.
ZeWaka
Do you know how you harvest sugar cane? You *burn* it.
Scoundreller
Sugar beets is the primary source of domestic produced sugar in US/Canada
mikepavone
Most places growing corn don't have the right climate for sugar cane.
graeme
I remember when the corn subsidies were introduced. I don't recall seeing any favourable commentary. Nor do I remember anyone in real life discussing them or saying "gee I'm glad we're saying the environment with biofuels"
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.
Animats
Even DOGE didn't dare go after ethanol subsidies.[1] Even the Cato Institute, which is classic conservative in position, is against them.
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-musk-doge-havent-gone-...
fsckboy
Cato Institute is big L Libertarian, not classic conservative
ptman
80% of UK’s waste oil would only power 0.6% of its flights
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...
whatever1
Just because you can drive 2’ and casually get 100 liters of gasoline does not make fossil fuel infinite. People forget that oil is not like air.
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.
hliyan
One (yet to be verified) insight I've had of late is that we make an implicit, paradoxical assumption about the unimpeded operation of the free market: that the rationality of market participants (a function of education), and their decision making (a function of information dissemination) somehow exists on a substrate unaffected by the market forces. In reality, not only are education and information (news) commoditized, but their supply is intermingled with the market dynamics of other products.
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.
dragonwriter
> 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? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car.
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.
joak
Agriculture is bad for biodiversity. The raison d'être of agriculture is to favor few species over all others. The goal of agriculture is to reduce biodiversity.
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.
0xbadcafebee
Lobbyists are responsible for all of the harm that Americans at large come to. Eco damage, car crashes, toxic chemicals in food, the drug war, wars in the Middle East, lack of public housing, the world's most expensive health care, union-busting, even heart disease. If you can think of it and it hurts lots of Americans, lobbyists were behind it.
Scoundreller
We need some anti-mosquito lobbyists. That’s an environment disaster I can get behind.
Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.
unanonymousanon
I think this takes too much responsibility off the politicians swayed by lobbyists and the corporations paying lobbyists. Don’t get me wrong, lobbyists have been middlemen in a lot of disastrous policy, but they’re not really the source of the problem.
kazinator
> 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?
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.
> 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? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?
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.