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The biofuel's bipartisan support isn't about science, but politics:
Two decades ago, when the world was wising up to the threat of climate change, the Bush administration touted ethanol — a fuel usually made from corn — for its threefold promise: It would wean the country off foreign oil, line farmers' pockets, and reduce carbon pollution. In 2007, Congress mandated that refiners nearly quintuple the amount of biofuels mixed into the nation's gasoline supply over 15 years. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, projected that ethanol would emit at least 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than conventional gasoline.
Scientists say the EPA was too optimistic, and some research shows that the congressional mandate did more climatic harm than good. A 2022 study found that producing and burning corn-based fuel is at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than refining and combusting gasoline. The biofuel industry and the Department of Energy, or DOE, vehemently criticized those findings, which nevertheless challenge the widespread claim that ethanol is something of a magic elixir.
"There's an intuition people have that burning plants is better than burning fossil fuels," said Timothy Searchinger. He is a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University and an early skeptic of ethanol. "Growing plants is good. Burning plants isn't."
Given all that, not to mention the growing popularity of electric vehicles, you'd think ethanol is on the way out. Not so. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continue to tout it as a way to win energy independence and save the climate. The fuel's bipartisan staying power has less to do with any environmental benefits than with disputed science and the sway of the biofuel lobby, agricultural economists and policy analysts told Grist.
"The only way ethanol makes sense is as a political issue," said Jason Hill, a bioproducts and biosystems engineering professor at the University of Minnesota.
Although the 15 billion gallons of ethanol mixed into gasoline each year falls well short of the 36 billion that President Bush hoped for, the number of refineries in the U.S. has nearly doubled to almost 200 since his presidency. Between 2008 and 2016, corn cultivation increased by about 9 percent. In some areas, like the Dakotas and western Minnesota, it rose as much as 100 percent during that time. Nationwide, corn land expanded by more than 11 million acres between 2005 and 2021.
"A quarter of all the corn land in the U.S. is used for ethanol. It's a land area equivalent to all the corn land in Minnesota and Iowa combined," said Hill. "That has implications. It's not just what happens in the U.S. It's what happens globally."
Journal Reference:Jan Lewandrowski, Jeffrey Rosenfeld, Diana Pape, et al. The greenhouse gas benefits of corn ethanol – assessing recent evidence [open], Biofuels (DOI: 10.1080/17597269.2018.1546488)
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 09, @06:08PM (7 children)
The problem is that biofuels don't balance out at any level so if you don't pass a senseless law to mix it in fuel, industry won't use it since it will just waste money and eat away at their carbon quotas.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Wednesday May 10, @08:42AM (6 children)
Biofuels balance out very well at the PR level. Just look at the name, it begins with "bio", it's got to be good.
That's actually a serious point, when I travelled in Europe I was astounded at how many food products had the name "bio" in them. What had been milk was now bio-milk, plain old cheese was bio-cheese, everything got a magic sprinkling of bio-dust to make people more likely to buy it and/or believe in it. It could be bio-asbestos, as long as it begins with "bio" it'll win public approval.
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday May 10, @10:12AM (5 children)
Well, there is a formal definition of "bio" in Europe which implies that the so-labeled food products pass certain standards. For example, bio-milk has to come from bio-cows, which are made so by the fact that their diet is strictly vegetarian (and probably some more criteria), you get the idea. Whether the definition is meaningful is a debate for another day.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday May 10, @10:40AM (2 children)
There's a a lot of details around homogenized and ultra-pasteurized milk I'm not familiar with but I'm guessing it's to differentiate from the reconstituted milk that went through fractionation (skimming to QC the fat content) and the stuff that was only pasteurized.
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(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 10, @10:51AM (1 child)
I've bought bio-milk before and it had an expiry date something like two weeks in the future, they must be doing something pretty non-bio to it to make it last that long.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday May 10, @11:57AM
Well, assuming "bio-milk" stands for organic milk (cattle fed on "organic" fodder whatever that means...), there's nothing additive about skimming/homogenizing and pasteurizing so it probably passes. e.g. an additive process would be to skim the cream but then, instead of homogenizing by reintroducing it at a controlled fat ratio, you'd replace it with cheaper (non-organic) vegetable oils.
The wikipedia entry is a bit thin on details but suggests it's nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_milk [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Wednesday May 10, @10:53AM (1 child)
We have something similar here, milk and meat is advertised as coming from grass-fed cows... I don't think we actually have anything other than grass-fed cows. Sort of like advertising a bag of sugar as "Now 100% fat-free!".
(Score: 2) by helel on Wednesday May 10, @11:23AM
Cows on feed lots are grain fed, not grass fed. There simply can't be enough grass on the feed lot for all the animals and harvesting and transporting grass isn't calorie dense enough to be efficient, to say nothing of the price of corn after subsidies are factored in. That said, grain fed is a bit of a misnomer because they also eat allot of soybeans.
Grass fed though is a bit fuzzy since it's sometimes used for creatures who got to eat grass when they were little calves and then moved to a feed lot so sometimes you'll also see grass finished to indicate the bovine continued to consume grass up to the point of slaughter. Or milking, in the case of dairy products.
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