“Michael Grunwald writes in the NYT, as America rushes to generate more renewable electricity, it has become fashionable to fret that solar and wind farms use too much land.”
By Doug Sheridan
Doug Sheridan
Michael Grunwald writes in the NYT, as America rushes to generate more renewable electricity, it has become fashionable to fret that solar and wind farms use too much land.
But America is also racing to produce more renewable fuels, and they use much, much more land to displace much, much less fossil fuel.
It’s fairly well-known that farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel accelerate food inflation and global hunger, but they’re also a disaster for the climate and the environment. And that’s mainly because they’re inefficient land hogs.
It takes about 100 acres worth of biofuels to generate as much energy as a single acre of solar panels—worldwide, a land mass larger than California was used to grow under 4% of transportation fuel in 2020. That’s a huge waste of precious land the world needs to store carbon that can stabilize our warming climate and grow crops that can help feed the growing population.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could help rein in that waste when it updates America’s sweeping mandate encouraging biofuel production later this month. It probably won’t, though, because in Washington, where cornethanolism is one of the last truly bipartisan ideologies, nearly everyone loves to pretend biofuels are green.
What makes corn-based ethanol distinct from most of our other wasteful agricultural giveaways is that it diverts crops from bellies to fuel tanks and uses almost as much fossil fuel—from fertilizers made of natural gas to diesel tractors, industrial refineries and other sources—as the ethanol replaces.
But the more damaging effect of biofuels, first revealed in a 2008 paper in the journal Science, is that they increase GHG emissions through the conversion of carbon-rich forests, wetlands and grasslands into farmland, expanding our agricultural footprint while shrinking nature’s.
By 2050, the world will need to grow an additional 7.4 quadrillion calories every year to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, while ending deforestation and other wilderness destruction to meet the emissions targets in the Paris climate accord. Biofuels make both jobs much harder.
Our Take: The green-climate lobby has had it's way for a while now in the US, and it's got conspicuously little to show for its efforts. One reason is the advocacy for non-solutions like biofuels. Until our decision-makers have the courage to face the truth, we'll continue down dual paths of wasteful spending and little progress in reducing emissions.
♻️ 🌽 | 🤦
#bioenergy #biofuels #alternativeenergy