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

31–40 of 257 posts

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

#31

Post by Scoundreller »

ars wrote: post #17
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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 fer…

They should switch to growing sugar cane. There's a high demand for sugar, plus sugar works even better than corn for ethanol.

Sugar beets is the primary source of domestic produced sugar in US/Canada

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

#32

Post by Scoundreller »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #23

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 need some anti-mosquito lobbyists. That’s an environment disaster I can get behind.

Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.

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

#33

Post by Scoundreller »

khelavastr wrote: post #22

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

And in the petrostate up North, Canada, we’ve required 10% ethanol (and possibly going up) in our gas…

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.

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

#34

Post by rpcope1 »

mlyle wrote: post #21
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #4

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.

Yah. There's some reason for ethanol in the fuel mix. Having the ability to do it at some scale is good for security purposes, and it helps tailpipe emissions. But that's a lot less corn-derived ethanol than we currently make/burn.

> There's some reason for ethanol in the fuel mix.

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).

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

#35

Post by sien »

in_cahoots wrote: post #7

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…

The EU does something impressively crazy burning 23 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021.

https://unece.org/media/press/372591

It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.

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

#36

Post by hliyan »

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.

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

#37

Post by daemonologist »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #4

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.

Biofuels in the US were mostly motivated by a desire to reduce oil imports ("energy security") and were a bipartisan misstep. The original mandate (7.5e9 gal/yr) was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed during a Republican trifecta, and was later expanded to 3.6e10 gal/yr by a Democratic congress in 2007 (still Bush - part of his "Twenty in Ten" energy security goal [0]). That said, reducing greenhouse gas emissions was definitely seen at the time as a benefit as well.

[0] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/stateoftheunion/...

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

#38

Post by voxelghost »

sien wrote: post #35
in_cahoots wrote: post #7

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…

The EU does something impressively crazy burning 23 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021. https://unece.org/media/press/372591 It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.

It's labeled 'renewable energy' (not electricity), if wood pellets are sourced from sustainable renewable forest growth.

What is your argument?

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

#39

Post by ptman »

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...

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

#40

Post by tzs »

> 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.

Post reply on HN