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Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

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

#81

Post by scaramanga »

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…

Yeah, the details are scattered through the article, so you've got to pay close attention. It says that the LCA that the industry produced ignored the carbon intensivity of draining wetland, creating more farmland, and fertilizing it. When that's accounted for (last 2 paragraphs, the bit of hagiography on Searchinger), biofuels isn't a climate policy anymore. Using an LCA that ignores the carbon emissions you're creating, misleads people, whether done on purpose or not.

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"

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

#82

Post by zekrioca »

febusravenga wrote: post #78
Gibbon1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm going senile, I've done this calculation a few times and consistently I get that a solar farm produces 25-50 times more energy a year than corn.

But corn is _stored_ energy that can be used at any time. PV is energy ar the current moment. Seems like this 20x loss the cost of storage... 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.

Batteries.

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

#83

Post by zekrioca »

hliyan wrote: post #36

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) commodit…

Which is what is happening right now.

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

#84

Post by zekrioca »

AngryData wrote: post #73
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…

This why im still a huge advocate for building nuclear power. In order to synthesize this kind of stuff from air instead of wasting all our farmland on it to have carbon neutral liquid or gas fuels available, we need insane amounts of energy. For some things batteries and other tech are the better option to switch to, but petroleum is still king for many applications and farming it with plants is extremely land ineff…

Should we set nuclear facilities all over the country?

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

#85

Post by merelysounds »

scaramanga wrote: post #80
tzs wrote: post #40

> 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…

It's explained in the article. 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. 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 c…

To be fair, it seems there are already regulations, both in the US and worldwide, that take into account LCA in some way.

But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.

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

#86

Post by IrishTechie »

anonym29 wrote: post #6

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…

It's been a long time since I dabbled, but from memory the likes of E85 is good for fixed load use (eg. drag racing) but not great for variable load (track racing cars, motocross etc) because petrol has a wide range of evaporation points compared to the much narrower range of E85.

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

#87

Post by theurerjohn3 »

lazide wrote: post #46
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.

No they aren’t. 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?

i think there may have been some confusion about the parent comment

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!

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

#88

Post by wizzwizz4 »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #76
knappe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look dude, read the papers or read the book. I don't have much more to offer you. This isn't just about the forest itself but about the land used to grow the forest. "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 mo…

So I see what you’re saying. You’re talking about the whole system. Take land and then plant trees, the trees sequester carbon as they grow, some of them fall to the forest floor continuing to sequester carbon. But, I think the issue with your argument is, this process isn’t indefinite. The natural cycle is that these trees will decay, fall, rot (releasing carbon naturally) or natural forest fires will burn them anyw…

The planet isn't infinite: by running the cycle more quickly, you knock the "baseline" atmospheric carbon up a few more ppm. This has knock-on effects.

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

#89

Post by blitzar »

petre wrote: post #61
sien wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think the furniture industry does with the wood byproducts such as sawdust and bark?

IKEA. We should burn discarded ikea (wooden) furniture too.

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

#90

Post by burnt-resistor »

mschuster91 wrote: post #79
AngryData wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crop subsidies are certainly poorly applied and poorly distributed, but we also need to not throw the baby out with the bath water. Crop subsidization is the only alternative to the granary system, which while decent still resulted in repeated famines for thousands of years basically everywhere, while no country that has decent crop subsidization ever has famine. Crop subsidization in general makes granaries 90% obso…

The problem is, you almost always end up with a massive amount of overproduction. That either ends up diverted into fuel production, which raises ethical concerns on one side and prolongs the use of fossil fuels because it's "effectively free" and so stops people from switching over to electric mobility on the other side. And on top of that, many Western countries routinely dump their overproduction on Africa, where…

Grain overproduction is also a significant driver of climate change. Fossil fuels, meat, and GMO monocultures aren't ecologically sustainable in current form, they continue because of capture of factions of governments by corrupt lobbying interests who threaten elected officials into driving more cash and favorable regulations their way.
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