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.
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.
Per https://www.eia.gov/kids/history-of-energy/timelines/ethanol...
It looks like it usage of ethanol as an additive started increasing around the same time lead was being phased out.
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.)
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)
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.
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.
Most rail should be powered by overhead electricity, but for short- to medium-term gains BEMUs are also great, with most European train manufacturers not building DMUs anymore. They'll hopefully also come down in price, as this first generation is really expensive.
I know that the US (and Canada) has issues with battery busses, but in (western) Europe, they work great (but currently still a tad too expensive). Trolley busses are even more expensive (similar if not higher purchasing cost, much higher infrastructure cost, slightly less energy usage) and require a whole lengthy political process to deploy, while battery busses can be deployed in a few months.
BEVs are the only feasible solution for replacing a large part, if not most, of the emissions from cars. Even in countries with a great countrywide transit network and reasonable bike infrastructure (Germany), 73% of passenger-kilometers are traveled by car (MiD 2023, 19% by transit, 4% by bike, 4% by walking), down from 80% in 2002. There is no way to much more than double transit usage in the next 15-20 years. And the situation is much worse in e.g. the USA where little good transit exists, where good infrastructure exists operations suck, building transit is astoundingly expensive, land developmental patterns run contra feasible attractive transit and transit agencies seem unable to learn anything from outside the US (in operations, construction, planning, ...).
This is not to say that anti-car policies (and pro-walking/biking/transit) policies shouldn't be implemented and are in many cases preferable compared to subsidizing BEVs, but their potential in the short- to medium-term for carbon reduction is quite limited.
(just in case it's not obvious)
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?
We're going to have almost universal BEV adoption before the carbon avoidance cost of synthetic gasoline becomes attractive.
Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.
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".
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.
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
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
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.
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.
If our tiny company is getting requested to bid on life safety systems for biogas operations it must be a lot bigger of an industry than you believe it to be.
lazide•7mo ago
It was great for farmers though.
itsanaccount•7mo ago
throwawaymaths•7mo ago
rgmerk•7mo ago
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
throwawaymaths•7mo ago
throwawaymaths•7mo ago
> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel
https://www.nola.com/news/business/bp-shutters-biofuel-plant...
rgmerk•7mo ago
lazide•7mo ago
Nothing is going to beat fossil fuels on pure economics, so then we’re left with what political pressure will be applied and how much to make other options economic enough.
Biofuels are so marginal, it’s unlikely they’re going to ‘win’ as they would require exceptional political pressure and excluding a lot of other options.
throwawaymaths•7mo ago
Yes. I would think that too. But the market isn't efficient, VCS are definitely not efficient, and it takes a lot of capital to spin up a factory, and the number of qualified people to run this factory is probably in the hundreds worldwide. Also ppl who worked on it in the past might be burned out, or not have access to key IP... Hundreds of things could get in the way
pfdietz•7mo ago
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•7mo ago
not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)
pfdietz•7mo ago
throwawaymaths•7mo ago
pfdietz•7mo ago
There is one success story, in Brazil.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/75/7/22/2848574/Wh...
Conversion of cellulosic biomass into chemicals other than ethanol might be the better route to take, particularly if green hydrogen can be used to boost the yield. Virent (which was bought out by an oil company) has a process for doing this. It would yield even more fuel per unit of biomass than conversion to ethanol, as potentially all the carbon can end up in the fuel. The fuel could also be drop-in replacement for existing hydrocarbon fuels. But there's not much interest in this as long as oil is still being used.
throwawaymaths•7mo ago
magnuspaaske•7mo ago
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•7mo ago
Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.
lazide•7mo ago