Going exactly the wrong way on biofuels
What with one thing and another, to say the very least, this hasn’t been getting much attention.
President Donald Trump’s administration June 14 proposed requiring record biofuel blending into the US fuel supply over the next two years, including unexpectedly strong quotas for biomass-based diesel…
The proposal alone is likely to boost biofuel production, which has been down to start the year as biorefineries have struggled to grapple with uncertainty about future blend mandates, the halting rollout of a new clean fuel tax credit, and higher import tariffs. The National Oilseed Processors Association said hiking the biomass-based diesel mandate to the proposed levels would bring “idled capacity back online” and spur “additional investments” in the biofuel supply chain.
(UkrAgroConsult)
From what I’ve seen the ethanol mandate for gasoline would stay where it’s at. That is, it would still be way too high, because anything above a big fat zero is way too high. Ethanol fuel has been a disaster. Even as another disaster is being created with new fervor:
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Republicans are pushing under President Trump would roll back almost all the clean energy incentives that Democrats enacted under President Biden, shredding federal support for solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles, and other climate-friendly technologies. But it would make a lavish exception for one supposedly green form of energy that isn’t green at all: farm-grown jet fuels.
Aviation, which generated about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize, and the U.S. aviation industry has committed to using so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” to reach its net-zero climate goals. But using crops like corn and soybeans to produce fuel instead of food not only increases food prices and global hunger, it spurs farmers around the world to tear down more forests and plow up more grasslands to create new farmland to replace the lost food. That’s why farm-grown biofuels have been a climate problem masquerading as a climate solution for cars, and they would have the same problem in planes.
(E360)
Comment from Joe Musich: Vance wants more babies. The world needs less. I fear there is no way out of this if we don’t seriously accept that.
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