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.
It's just that agriculture conglomerates get what they want because everyone thinks farmers should get whatever they want
But that's a lot less corn-derived ethanol than we currently make/burn.
Uh, maybe from a "we can grow our own fuel perspective", but I've never seen a car run better on E10 or E85 than E0. Basically everything (including the newest and fanciest engines) runs like ass if you've got ethanol in there (and now you have to contend with your fuel having a component that's hydrophilic, which is a huge problem in and of itself, and brutal on natural rubber). Some things specifically built for ethanol as the primary fuel might be OK, but E10 is kind of a travesty.
We'd have been better served just working more towards synthetic gasoline and biodiesel (and I'll make a strong wager that there's still going to be a lot of gas/diesel powered stuff 20-30 years out, and we're going to be going back to trying to get good at synthesizing fuel).
[0] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/stateoftheunion/...
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.
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
Yup, just as a point of reference, something like 70% of Illinois corn goes straight into Illinois hogs.
https://unece.org/media/press/372591
It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.
What is your argument?
Trees grow again. They are renewed.
What is this junk?
Crops can be rotated.
Trees can be non-clear cut when harvested.
None of this changes the definition of renewable.
Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest. The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The land used is not free; it could have instead stayed a forest and remained a carbon sink. When you compare wood pellets using for generating energy and compare it to other forms of energy generation it no longer holds up as a renewable resource after you take into account the land that could have been kept instead as a forest and carbon sink.
This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil.
Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning.
The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 year old range, because that is when the bulk of the actual growth is occurring.
Renewable doesn’t mean ‘indefinite carbon sink’. Renewable means ‘renews’.
This entire discussion is incredibly ridiculous.
"In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests, published in Nature in 2023, WRI researchers using a biophysical model estimated that annual wood harvests over the next few decades will emit 3.5-4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. That is more than 3 times the world’s current annual average aviation emissions. These wood-harvest emissions occur because the great majority of carbon stored in trees is released to the atmosphere after harvest when roots and slash decompose; as most wood is burned directly for heat or electricity or for energy at sawmills or paper mills; and when discarded paper products, furniture and other wood products decompose or burn. Another recent paper in Nature found that the word’s remaining forests have lost even more carbon, primarily due to harvesting wood, than was lost historically by converting forests to agriculture (other studies have found similar results1). Based on these analyses, a natural climate solution would involve harvesting less wood and letting more forests regrow. This would store more carbon as well as enhance forest biodiversity."[0]
[0]https://www.wri.org/technical-perspectives/wood-harvest-emis...
And the original paper that introduced the idea of land use https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1151861
But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.
This is why you can't ignore land use changes in carbon budgets. It's a sound argument, it's not ridiculous at all.
Ah, end eventually trees will not regrow, because they need soil for that. And water. Modern forestry is far from renewable. Only externalities having a longer time-frame to kick in are conveniently ignored by the decision makers and the masses willing to see only the upsides.
Burning pellets as Bioenergy is renewable - it's just not sustainable[1] or climate-friendly.
[1] not sustainable in large scale use.
https://spectator.sme.sk/culture-and-lifestyle/c/new-documen...
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.
... and be overwhelming underwhelmed?
And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
I do want to note though that corn is possibly one of the least useful crops to subsidize, it is one of the most robust and predictable food crops we grow, which is why so much of it is grown despite a large fraction of it's energy going into worthless stalk. More delicate crops that have larger and less predictable yield swings, like wheat, or something with delicate fruits that can't be stored long, likely deserve the majority of subsidization money that currently goes towards corn.
And on top of that, many Western countries routinely dump their overproduction on Africa, where as a result of all that free aid, local food production industry has all but vanished. Up until the '00s, Simbabwe was known as "Africa's corn chamber" - that is long gone now.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1151861
"These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years"
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-musk-doge-havent-gone-...
is the Cato institute without the novel anti human rights anti environment spicing?
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.
But we don’t grow enough corn to do that and therefore 60% of the ethanol is imported from USA.
Kinda a weird dependency to create as a petrostate.
Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.
No, it doesn't happen because you can't make money out of that. So there's nobody to pay/hire the lobbyist.
Same reason why there's hardly research into new antibiotics. It's hard to make money on those as they tend to cure. Chronic diseases and their subscriptions to suppress symptoms, that's where money is to be made
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.
Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral.
Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon.
Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon.
But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in
> 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?
then the correct approach would be
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for *burying in the ground* and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
unless i am misunderstanding these two comments? some clarity would be great!
But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss.
All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.
But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.
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.
PaulHoule•5h ago
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.
jfengel•5h ago
PaulHoule•5h ago
gsf_emergency_2•5h ago
Here's a breakdown by sources (2023)
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
ars•4h ago
mikepavone•4h ago
Scoundreller•3h ago
ZeWaka•1h ago
0xbadcafebee•4h ago
toomuchtodo•4h ago
Gibbon1•1h ago
thijson•58m ago
febusravenga•57m ago
Interesting take though, I'm not saying that growing corn is best way to "produce stored energy", but in your comparison it's almost like direct competition to for PV + batteries of any sort.
zekrioca•24m ago