Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 257 posts

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#141

Post by lazide »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #69
lazide wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense with the definition of ‘renewable’. Trees grow again. They are renewed. What is this junk?

The soil is degraded, washed away on clear-cut forests, and even old-growth protected forests are being relabeled unprotected to provide energy for the industry all over Eastern-Europe. The resulting flash floods, the water of which is harder to retain on the lowlands are worsening the droughts and the effects of climate change. Ah, end eventually trees will not regrow, because they need soil for that. And water. Mod…

In the US that is not how it has been done in a very, very long time. At this point all US timberland is multi-generation new growth; and is doing just fine.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#142

Post by 7952 »

eptcyka wrote: post #48
knappe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Burning wood pellets is carbon neutral. Any forrest is a great carbon sink until it matures and it saturates, i.e. growth reaches replacement equilibrium and old trees/growth decay, releasing the CO2.

It depends on the time and spatial scale. And how much replanting is happening.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#143

Post by 7952 »

lazide wrote: post #47
knappe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes no sense with the definition of ‘renewable’. Trees grow again. They are renewed. What is this junk?

So do fish when they are harvested from the ocean. But that doesn't mean it is sustainable.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#144

Post by RivieraKid »

griffzhowl wrote: post #121
jbstack wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields" This doesn't make any sense to me. With petrol, you are transferring carbon from a store to the atmosphere every time you use it for energy. With a wetland, y…

I think the idea is that the wetland or forest or whatever is a carbon sink in the sense that they have a net negative effect on carbon in the atmosphere each year. Growing corn and then burning it would at best be net zero if no further atmospheric carbon were produced by the production processes, fertilizers etc., which it is. So the differences between the two scenarios is net negative versus net positive atmosphe…

A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#145

Post by lazide »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #109
lazide wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we converted all arable land in the United States to forest, best case we would take many years to sequester even a single years fossil carbon emissions. And we’d all starve to death in the process. Any co2 released by harvesting a forest, is very shortly taken back up again by the forest regrowing. Within a lifetime for sure. Trees are nice, I get it. But this is all in the noise.

Where do these numbers come from?

USFS studies, and US data on overall arable land. I broke it out in a prior thread exhaustively, but it’s been covered in other areas too. Here is one [https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_wo059.pdf]

The US emits a truly massive amount of fossil carbon. [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...], “Total emissions in 2022 are 6,343.2 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent”. Yes, that is 6 billion metric tons of co2 equivalent a year. 6 trillion kg. Or about 20,000 kg per person in the US, every year.

Currently (since ~ 1990), US forested land is estimated to offset ~ 13% of fossil co2 emissions. Forests cover 36% (!) of US land area, and have been slowly increasing since ~ 2000.

Farmland covers another 39% of US land [https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Censu...].

Pretty much all the rest is either 1) waterways, 2) cities, 3) non-arable land like steep mountains and deserts with no ready source of water.

So even with a back of the envelope, easy math, if we changed all our farmland to grow forests, we’d roughly double the amount of carbon we could sequester - which would still be ~ 25% of the amount of fossil carbon we’re emitting, every year.

And then we would still need to DO something with all that wood, because burning it or letting it rot just releases all it’s co2 back into the atmosphere.

And we’d all starve to death in the meantime.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#146

Post by lazide »

jkhdigital wrote: post #134
passwordoops wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral." No they do not. The accounting generally doesn't take into account the full emissions of agriculture, which for corn is particularly carbon intense. Not to mention the downstream pollution impacts of over fertilization, such as coastal dead zones

This is the salient point that is glossed over without so much as blinking. To get 1J of biofuel-based fuel, how many J of fossil fuel is burned? If it’s like 0.9J then you really have to ask how much carbon is released when turning carbon sinks into farmland, because it will take many many crop cycles to recoup that from biofuels.

That is the implementation detail that makes the whole thing a scam, yes. None of that is fundamental to bio-fuels, but rather a property of it being cheaper to do it that way in our current fossil fuel economy, and people not being interested in looking all that closely because they don’t really care.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#147

Post by Null-Set »

mapt wrote: post #137
jayd16 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.

This is such an off-base critique that it seems like deliberate trolling. The biofuel renewable carbon cycle takes carbon from the air, and burns the carbon once it's in the form of ethanol. It stops taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the sky. The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some…

So fuel would basically become a corn based battery. (Ideally something more efficient than corn would be grown though)

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#148

Post by thijson »

ptman wrote: post #39

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, wh…

I've found this web site to be informative about what it would take to go fully renewable:

https://www.withouthotair.com/

A lot of the calculations are back of the envelope, but I guess provide a ballpark estimate.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#149

Post by PaulHoule »

bluGill wrote: post #138
zekrioca wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries.

Not nearly as energy dense. Useful for some applicatons but liquid chemical fuels deliver more energy when space or weight are factors - despite the inefficiency.

E-Fuels. Specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_ether for agricultural engines in California because with no C-C bonds it is a soot free diesel fuel.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#150

Post by tim333 »

graeme wrote: post #20

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 t…

I had similar thoughts, although I'm a Brit, all coverage I've seen says it's environmentally largely useless but big ag has paid appropriate contributions to politicians to make it happen because money.
Post reply on HN