“Even though it was once embraced by some environmentalists, ethanol has turned out to be much better at providing common ground for wildly disparate presidents than cutting greenhouse gas emissions.”
“From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the renewable fuel standard has been a bust.”
Progressives ... don’t like nuclear, the only scaleable alternative to fossil fuels.
They dislike hydro power too, choosing some other priorities for dams other than CO2 reduction.
And on the transportation side, they don’t like the “renewable” alternative to gasoline and diesel, farm crop ethanol.
Ethanol has a niche as an oxygenate to combat traditional air pollution, carbon dioxide (CO2) aside.
The mandate increases the quantity beyond its environmental purpose, a pure subsidy to the farm lobby.
For many years, mainstream environmentalists have questioned whether ethanol is a net reducer of CO2.
... ethanol requires a whole lot of farming corn and sugarcane–increasing the surface imprint and machinery usage of humankind.
“Why Won’t Joe Biden Let Ethanol Die Already?“, asked Tom Philpott recently at Mother Jones (and redistributed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).
Excerpts are provided below as a ‘current’ into the Progressive Left’s thinking on the subject.
... The growing consensus among climate experts is that to slash carbon emissions quickly enough, we need to eliminate as much air-fouling combustion as possible while expanding wind and solar energy to power the grid.
Biden’s vowed to “promote ethanol and the next generation of biofuels,” declaring them “vital to the future of rural America—and the climate.”
Biden tapped longtime ethanol champion Tom Vilsack—former governor of Iowa, the fuel’s Saudi Arabia—to run the Department of Agriculture, a post he held under Obama.
Biden is doubling down on a bad idea that has flourished since the days of President George W. Bush.
... Bush pushed through a bipartisan law with a “renewable fuel standard” that effectively mandated a dramatic ramp-up in corn ethanol production.
As a result, the portion of the massive US corn crop devoted to the fuel rose from 11 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2015, where it has held steady.
Barack Obama and Donald Trump both joined the pro-ethanol presidential chorus.
Today, corn-based ethanol has replaced about 10 percent of “climate change causing petroleum” at the gas station ...
... Bush’s federal ethanol mandate tied us to internal combustion engines, which spew a range of disease-causing toxins along with heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Electric engines not only avoid tailgate fumes, they’re also much more efficient.
According to the Department of Energy, conventional vehicles convert at most 30 percent of the energy stored in liquid fuel to horsepower; the rest leaks out, mostly as heat.
Electric-powered vehicles, meanwhile, convert at least 60 percent of energy expended to locomotion.
... From 2010 to 2020, battery prices plunged 89 percent.
... maintaining ethanol production at current levels means propping up a wildly energy-wasting technology.
... From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the renewable fuel standard has been a bust, says Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering….
The environmental footprint of industrial-scale corn farming is another stain on ethanol’s claim to be a green fuel.
Corn typically covers about 90 million acres of farmland—an area nearly the size of California.
Fertilizing the crop emits nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon, as well as nitrate pollution that fouls water from the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, where it generates a low-oxygen dead zone larger than Connecticut.
.... methanol boosters include a portion of all corn farmers and their employees in their calculations (of new jobs)
But corn was a wildly overproduced crop when ethanol took off in the early 2000s.
The ethanol boom mostly created a market for surplus corn, not new jobs.
... With the rise of cheap electric car batteries and the expansion of renewable electricity, ethanol looks like yesterday’s fuel.
In 2022, the current renewable fuel standard will lapse, and Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency will have to decide whether to maintain federal support for this hangover of the oil-soaked Bush era."