Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

While it's true that Big Ag in the U.S. has oversold corn ethanol as a climate-friendly alternative, it's important to distinguish between types of biofuels. Not all ethanol is created equal.

Take Brazil, for example. Their ethanol program is fundamentally different. It's based on sugarcane, not corn, and it has a spectacular EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of about 8:1. That means for every unit of energy put into producing it, eight units are returned. By contrast, U.S. corn ethanol barely breaks even, with an EROI around 1.3:1 to 1.8:1.

Brazilian ethanol also sidesteps many of the land use and food diversion issues that plague U.S. biofuels. Sugarcane is mostly grown on degraded pastureland far from the Amazon, and it doesn’t displace staple food crops. Plus, the leftover biomass (bagasse) is burned to power the refineries themselves, making the process close to energy self-sufficient.

The Brazilian model shows that biofuels can work—but only under the right agricultural, environmental, and economic conditions. The U.S. corn ethanol lobby essentially hijacked the "green energy" narrative to push something that mostly benefits Big Ag subsidies and corn states, with questionable climate gains.

So yeah, skepticism about biofuels is warranted—but we should be careful not to throw out the good examples with the bad.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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...

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.

We've known for decades that it requires more energy to produce corn ethanol than is delivered in the ethanol produced. A lot of the necessary inputs are petroleum-based. This is not news.

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.

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.

Ah, E85. My wife's flex-fuel Chevy could use it, but it ran poorly and mileage noticeably dropped. It wasn't worth the meager savings (it's usually more expensive now) over regular gas. I've always wondered about the environmental impact. It's clear now that it's not great. I'm not surprised.

Literary Hub needs an editor. That title's grammar is appalling.

And the problems start there. Grunwald, adjectives spilling all over his page, needs a thesaurus for "uphill battle." Stylistically, this is a mess.

Style aside, Grunwald implies that maize is field corn and not sweet corn. It actually means both. This is clearly not a well-researched article on ethanol.

Beyond that we see his politics on his sleeve, tying ADM to Watergate. And a misunderstanding of the meaning of "corps," as the "Corps of Engineers" is not "the Army Corps." This is sadly childish. No, that's unfair to children. I've seen better journalism from high school kids.

> 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.

I always thought that trading precious topsoil for motive power when oil does just fine was an insane premise. Too bad not enough people recognize this for what it is. Biomass is another issue that I find grossly inappropriate.

> 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.

I just always assumed we grow excess corn for food security reasons and we turn the excess into ethanol so it doesn’t rot/go to waste, the other options are cornmeal or exporting it.

Big agriculture lying about the public benefits of ethanol is irrelevant, food security is more important in the event of a crisis that prevents agricultural imports than any negative externalities of turning corn into ethanol.

The public wants to be mislead by dumb-ass feelgood statements about how green something inefficient and expensive is.

I thought the US approach to biofuels was always understood as a Republican head fake towards climate change action during Bush without doing anything that would threaten oil interests while simultaneously enriching their donor and voting base with all our tax dollars.

Biofuels get the subsidies so that in case of a major crisis like war there is enough food and some fuel for essential services.

It is not that hard to understand. It is possible that studies were tweaked to support another narrative, but farm subsidies always serve strategic interests.

Corn ethanol as a car fuel looks espeically bad if you compare it to solar generation on the same land area. You get ~200x car miles per acre with solar electric vs corn and combustion engine.

“ spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.”

Ourselves? Soylent Green for cars?

Keeping dollars in the USA and away from petrstates certainly isn't an understated benefit.

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.

Corn is just a very inefficient solar panel.

This article is just state propaganda which wants artificially dumped food prices (otherwise riots) decoupled from arbitrary energy prices

If the carbon has been stored 1 million years ago and you burn it the total net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases

If the carbon was stored last year and you burn it the net amount of carbon stays about the same YoY

Moving the transport sector over to the latter carbon or electrical would be a good direction in general

Disregarding spidy senses and mental gymnastics about people starving if they dont eat all that corn, I dont understand how we fail to see this as a net benefit and crap articles like that get produced

Just wait until you learn about the crazy stuff like corn syrup, “fortified” highly processed white bread and sugary kids cereal they’ve pushed for the last 40 years. There’s a reason the farm bill tackles both ends: Farm subsidies and SNAP - American taxpayers are literally subsidizing the obesity health crisis.

I know the general public should never be expected to subsidize enthusiasts, but E85 - available in many places for under $3/gal - has many of the same performance characteristics as $20/gal race gas for performance automotive enthusiasts.

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!