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.

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.

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!

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.

[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-musk-doge-havent-gone-...

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.

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.

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.

Ourselves? Soylent Green for cars?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.