06 Jul Elementor #18938
I’m running a Seattle Times ad July 11, 2024 thanking EV buyers for not buying ethanol
By Ed Newbold
Posted July 6, 2024 from Seattle, WA
“You can’t be for the status quo with ethanol and still be for saving the planet,” is the way Scott Barton, a lobbyist with the Environmental Working Group, summed up the issue. We should not be fooled by how little anyone ever talks about ethanol, by how much folks take it for granted. This is a big issue and for the sake of the climate, the environment and the hunger crisis, we must find a way to beat ethanol. Thank you EV buyers: You are coming to the rescue and we need more of you!!!
Here is the wording of the ad I’m planning to run in the Seattle Times Sunday July 11, 2024.
EV Buyers don’t get the credit they deserve for not buying Ethanol.
The ethanol mandate has become politically sacred and ethanol has been left out of the current factionalization of US politics. But the massive damage ethanol has done to the environment has long been noted by scientists not associated with Ethanol Inc. Now, it’s worse. Droughts are threatening to starve yet more of the world’s people as the mandate forces the set-aside of ever more US farmland. EV buyers aren’t having any of this as they no longer tithe at the gas pump. Do they know what heroes they are?
(End of ad text)
The most basic stats of Ethanol reveal its hideous overuse of land
In the ad I say the environmental damage of ethanol has long been noted by scientists not associated with Ethanol Inc, but you don’t need to be a scientist to understand the basic problem ethanol has. David Grunwald, in a June 6, 2023 New York Times opinion piece, notes that, “a land mass larger than California was used to grow under 4 percent of transportation fuel in 2020.” For those who would rather have a number, he could have said “36 million acres.”
Those basic numbers answer the scalability question. Ethanol is not scalable. We don’t have another California-sized chunk of land that would bring us to a thrilling 8% of motor-transport-fleet-fuel replaced. When “solutions” are not scalable, and the stats are so laughable, (although it’s not funny) that is the first clue you aren’t even looking at a “solution” at all.
Indeed, the voracious need for land by ethanol is the first among many reasons it is worse for the climate and the environment than simply burning gasoline, and that is a low bar. The unintended, at least by the public, effect of ethanol is to push the agriculture that would have been on the land we are using for ethanol into the prairie and the tropical forests. This conversion results in the release of carbon into the atmosphere from this land that had been storing carbon. A Reuters article from Feb 14, 2022 reports the findings of a study that found that ethanol was at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline.
The article, by Leah Douglas, was titled, “U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds”
Let me quote some paragraphs:
“ Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday.
“The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.”
“Corn ethanol is not a climate-friendly fuel,” said Dr. Tyler Lark, assistant scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment and lead author of the study.
”The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.”
Mandate vs. Subsidy
Economists have long noted the difficulty in rolling back subsidies of any kind, and the ethanol subisides are notoriously cemented-in politically. But it is critical to note that it’s the mandate, not the subsidies, that make ethanol such a menace to the environment, to world food prices, and to the climate. It’s the mandate that mostly sets ethanol free from market forces to a very great degree. (There are also mandates coming down the pike and in practice for heat pumps, EVs, insulation and such, although the most market-altering ones are mostly only on the drawing board.) (Mandates are never the “right” way to go, I would argue, but mandating a destructive technology is the worst of both worlds. If there is a mandate for heat pumps, it might not be the best way to help heat pumps, but the customer will in some sense benefit from it. Since ethanol is an eggrediously inefficient source of energy, mandating it is and has been very destructive.
The power of a mandate over and above a subsidy is easy to see using the hypothetical example of what would happen if the Government was trying to help my art sakes (!) If I get a subsidy, say, of $20 per every $100 worth that is ordered, I would probably make more money as I would get to charge a lower price and still make the same profit as I would at a higher price. It might add 15% to my net income or something like that. However, a mandate is entirely different. If every time anyone remodeled their house they were forced to spend 1% on my art, my sales will be “set free” from normal market forces and money and orders will begin to rain down upon me as I reaped the reward of a captive market. That’s when I would have my own yacht broker except I have trouble being on a boat for more than 8 hours total.
This mandate is basically the only real reason anyone buys ethanol, other than the ethanol that comes with food waste, which no one has any objection to and which is legitimately seen as a relatively “clean” fuel to use a terrible terminology.
Politically, the Ethanol mandate is turning out to be bulletproof. Although there are plenty of famers who aren’t enamored of it (Ted Cruz came out against it and famously won the Iowa caucuses one year.), it does help farmers particularly those who own their own land and the farm states of the Midwest are well-represented in the legislature and the presidential contest every four years and both parties desperately need Midwestern electoral college voters each election. (Whether we will still have an election in four years after this year may be up to a Donald Trump who will now have kingly powers granted by his own supreme court—Please do not vote for him!).
Additionally, there is a powerful and wealthy group of companies at the top of US and World Agrobusiness that stand guard over the ethanol mandate. They haven’t been vocal on the subject lately because they haven’t needed to be but remember the Olympics that were littered with “Think Green/Act Yellow” ads? That was them. They were so much smarter and so much more clairvoyant then than the public or the news media, or even the many environmental organizations who bought into the ethanol package in totality. What these land-rich companies were probably trying to do was raise commodity and land prices globally, and they succeeded as nothing raises both like a mandate for a crop that is a forced add-on to what is already being grown. Also, it was an international scheme so worldwide, about 72 nations instituted various biofuel mandates.
As a result of the politics and the money, “In Washington DC,” writes Grunwald, “… where corn ethanolism is one of the last truly bipartisan ideologies, nearly everyone loves to pretend biofuels are green.” Sadly reporters and journalists seem to have been taken in also, including ones you might not think were vulnerable, such as many public-radio journalists and most journalists in the mainstream press. The rank-in-file on the libertarian/small-government/political right in America used to be associated with opposition to ethanol, but politics seems to have swamped them. Anti-ethanolism is a natural for true conservatives, whom the current Republican Party has partially abandoned, as ethanol may be the world’s best example to insert into Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: “Government doesn’t solve problems, it subsidizes them.” But now that right-populism has won, we have Donald Trump’s 2020 declaraton: “I love ethanol” in Iowa in 2020. (Note: on the night before this ad ran, Donald Trump was shot. Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully he wasn’t killed, only a matter of inches. My heart goes out to the family of the man killed and those who were severely wonded.)
Of all the subsidies given to agriculture, Ethanol stands apart. For one thing, our gratitude to farmers for growing our food, a strong component of the support for Ethanol, is not operative here. Grunwald draws another distinction: “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.”
Ethanol is also the major culprit in the creation of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and the sucking dry of the Oglalla Aquifer, because not only is ethanol land-hungry but also water-hungry and chemical hungry. Ever bought “organic” ethanol? Here is a link to a report from the National Wildlife Federation on ethanol which documents these issues:
Link
In my ad I point out that the current worldwide drought is threatening to drive many more people into starvation. This is where ethanol takes on a whiff of criminality. Our country is guilty of being too glib about removing agricultural land from food production by government fiat. If change cannot be made at the governmental level, and the fealty to biofuels by even the most climate-aware groups in the mainstream, including NPR, the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, we need to start thinking about anything that might work to defeat Ethanol. Luckily the auto industry is providing us with superior cars that don’t use a drop of ethanol ever. Thanks are due to everyone who has bought an EV and everyone who is considering it.
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February 2014
Forbes Article on Ethanol an Oldy but Goldie!
It’s Final–Corn Ethanol is of no use
by James Conca
OK, can we please stop pretending biofuel made from corn is helping the planet and the environment? The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two of its Working Group reports at the end of last month (WGI and WGIII), and their short discussion of biofuels has ignited a fierce debate as to whether they’re of any environmental benefit at all.
The IPCC was quite diplomatic in its discussion, saying “Biofuels have direct, fuel‐cycle GHG emissions that are typically 30–90% lower than those for gasoline or diesel fuels. However, since for some biofuels indirect emissions—including from land use change—can lead to greater total emissions than when using petroleum products, policy support needs to be considered on a case by case basis” (IPCC 2014 Chapter 8).
The summary in the new report also states, “Increasing bioenergy crop cultivation poses risks to ecosystems and biodiversity” (WGIII).
The report lists many potential negative risks of development, such as direct conflicts between land for fuels and land for food, other land-use changes, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity and nitrogen pollution through the excessive use of fertilizers (Scientific American).
The International Institute for Sustainable Development was not so diplomatic, and estimates that the CO2 and climate benefits from replacing petroleum fuels with biofuels like ethanol are basically zero (IISD). They claim that it would be almost 100 times more effective, and much less costly, to significantly reduce vehicle emissions through more stringent standards, and to increase CAFE standards on all cars and light trucks to over 40 miles per gallon as was done in Japan just a few years ago.
With more than 60 nations having biofuel mandates, the competition between ethanol and food has become a moral issue. Groups like Oxfam and the Environmental Working Group oppose biofuels because they push up food prices and disproportionately affect the poor.
Most importantly, the new IPCC report is a complete about-face for the UN’s Panel. Its 2007 report was broadly condemned by some environmentalists for giving the green light to large-scale biofuel production, resulting in environmental and food supply problems.
The general discussion on biofuels has changed over the last few years. In December, Senators Feinstein (D-CA) and Coburn (R-OK) introduced a bill that would eliminate the corn ethanol mandate within the Federal Renewable Fuel Standard (Oil&Gas Journal) that requires blending ethanol into gasoline at increasing levels over the next decade. It was met with stiff opposition from heavily agricultural states, but had strong support from the petroleum industry. However, now that the tax credit and import tariffs have expired and ethanol is holding its own economically, it remains to be seen if the industry can stand up to this pressure.
So where is the U.S. today in corn ethanol space?
In 2000, over 90% of the U.S. corn crop went to feed people and livestock, many in undeveloped countries, with less than 5% used to produce ethanol. In 2013, however, 40% went to produce ethanol, 45% was used to feed livestock, and only 15% was used for food and beverage (AgMRC).
The United States will use over 130 billion gallons of gasoline this year, and over 50 billion gallons of diesel. On average, one bushel of corn can be used to produce just under three gallons of ethanol. If all of the present production of corn in the U.S. were converted into ethanol, it would only displace 25% of that 130 billion.
But it would completely disrupt food supplies, livestock feed, and many poor economies in the Western Hemisphere because the U.S. produces 40% of the world’s corn. Seventy percent of all corn imports worldwide come from the U.S. Simply implementing mandatory vehicle fuel efficiencies of 40 mpg would accomplish much more, much faster, with no collateral damage.
In 2014, the U.S. will use almost 5 billion bushels of corn to produce over 13 billion gallons of ethanol fuel. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for a year, so the amount of corn used to make that 13 billion gallons of ethanol will not feed the almost 500 million people it was feeding in 2000. This is the entire population of the Western Hemisphere outside of the United States.
In 2007, the global price of corn doubled as a result of an explosion in ethanol production in the U.S. Because corn is the most common animal feed and has many other uses in the food industry, the price of milk, cheese, eggs, meat, corn-based sweeteners and cereals increased as well. World grain reserves dwindled to less than two months, the lowest level in over 30 years.
Additional unintended effects from the increase in ethanol production include the dramatic rise in land rents, the increase in natural gas and chemicals used for fertilizers, over-pumping of aquifers like the Ogallala that serve many mid-western states, clear-cutting forests to plant fuel crops, and the revival of destructive practices such as edge tillage. Edge tillage is planting right up to the edge of the field thereby removing protective bordering lands and increasing soil erosion, chemical runoff and other problems. It took us 40 years to end edge tillage in this country, and overnight ethanol brought it back with a vengeance.
Most fuel crops, such as sugar cane, have problems similar to corn. Because Brazil relied heavily on imported oil for transportation, but can attain high yields from crops in their tropical climate, the government developed the largest fuel ethanol program in the world in the 1990s based on sugar cane and soybeans.
Unfortunately, Brazil is clear-cutting almost a million acres of tropical forest per year to produce biofuel from these crops, and shipping much of the fuel all the way to Europe. The net effect is about 50% more carbon emitted by using these biofuels than using petroleum fuels (Eric Holt-Giménez, The Politics of Food). These unintended effects are why energy policy and development must proceed holistically, considering all effects on global environments and economies.
So why have we pushed corn ethanol so heavily here in the U.S.? Primarily because it was the only crop that had the existing infrastructure to easily modify for this purpose, especially when initially incentivized with tax credits, subsidies and import tariffs. Production, transportation and fermentation could be adapted quickly by the corn industry, unlike any other crop.
We should remember that humans originally switched from biomass to fossil fuels because biomass was so inefficient, and took so much energy and space to produce. So far technology has not reversed these problems sufficiently to make widespread use beneficial.
What else can we use to produce biofuel?
Two leading strategies involve ethanol production from the degradation of cellulosics, and biodiesel production from algae.
The common alcohol, ethanol, has been harnessed by humans for millennia, made through the microbial conversion of biomass materials, typically sugars, through fermentation. The process starts with a solution of fermentable sugars, fermented to ethanol by microbes, and then the ethanol is separated and purified by distillation.
Fermentation involves microorganisms, typically yeasts, that evolved billions of years ago before Earth’s atmosphere contained oxygen, to use sugars for food and in the process produced ethanol, CO2 and other byproducts:
(sugar) C6H12O6 → 2 CH3CH2OH + 2 CO2 (ethanol + carbon dioxide)
Microorganisms typically use 6-carbon sugars and their precursors, glucose and sucrose. But because sugars and starches are foods, a better alternative for ethanol production should be from non-food cellulosic materials, such as paper, cardboard, wood, and other fibrous plant material. Switchgrass and napier grass have been studied extensively as the best alternatives.
Cellulosics are abundant and much of the supply is considered waste. Cellulosics are comprised of lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. Lignin provides structural support for the plant and encloses the cellulose and hemicellulose molecules, making it more difficult to process for fuel.
Thus, efficiently making ethanol out of cellulosics requires a different approach than for corn. They can either be reacted with acid (sulfuric is most common), degraded using enzymes produced from microbes, or heated to a gas and reacted with chemical catalysts (thermo-chemical). Each has its variations, some can be combined, and all are attempting to be commercialized. Still, these processes are stuck at about twice the price per gallon produced compared to corn. Recently, special microorganisms have been genetically engineered to ferment these materials into ethanol with relatively high efficiency.
It’s no wonder we just went with corn!
Another less discussed biofuel strategy is biodiesel replacing petroleum diesel. Biodiesel is made by combining almost any oil or fat with an alcohol such as ethanol or methanol.
Biodiesel can be run in any diesel engine without modification and produces less toxic emissions and particulates than petroleum diesel. It causes less wear and tear on engines, and increases lubricity and engine efficiency, and releases about 60% less CO2 emissions than petroleum diesel.
Rudolf Diesel originally developed the diesel engine to run on diesel from food oils such as peanut and soybean, but animal fats and any other natural oil can be used. However, almost a hundred years ago, the need for fuel outstripped the supply of natural oils and petroleum become the only abundant source available.
The most common natural oils used are rapeseed and canola oil, but a particularly promising candidate is oil from algae. Algae production uses non-productive land and brine water and produces over 20 times the oil production of any food crop. An acre of algae can produce almost 5,000 gallons of biodiesel. It does not compete with food crops for arable land or potable water and could produce over 60 billion gallons/yr that would replace all petroleum-based diesel in the U.S.
However, all algae production facilities presently sell their crops to the food and cosmetic industry at a much greater profit than they would get from the fuel industry.
I guess for biofuels, as for any other source, there’s just no such thing as a free lunch.
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.”
“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.
President Biden’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, outlined the biggest federal biofuels spending package in 15 years. Last week, its ethanol subsidies became a sticking point among House Republicans debating a bill over the federal debt limit. Eight Corn Belt Republicans staunchly, and successfully, opposed a proposal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and curb federal spending because it would have repealed tax credits for the ethanol industry.
Regulators remain equally enamored. The ethanol industry is celebrating the EPA’s recent announcement that, for the second straight year, it will waive a ban on summertime sales of E15 gasoline. The fuel, which contains as much as 15 percent ethanol, has long been prohibited during warm months amid concerns that it creates smog. And with automakers embracing EVs, the ethanol industry is lobbying the Biden administration to extend federal subsidies to ethanol-based “sustainable” aviation fuel. Ethanol producers also plan to tap into carbon-capture subsidies to build pipelines that would carry carbon from refineries to underground storage tanks.
A lot of this stems from the fact the U.S. produces more corn than any other country — 13.7 billion bushels last year — and about a third of that, worth some $20 billion, is used to produce ethanol. While biofuels can be made from all kinds of organic material, from soybeans to manure, about 90 percent of the nation’s supply comes from corn. No wonder the ethanol boom has been called the Great Corn Rush.
And a rush it has been. 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.”
As more land at home has been tilled to grow corn for ethanol, commodity prices have gone up worldwide. In turn, growers seeking higher profits have embraced crops used to make biofuels. The expansion of soybeans and palm, in particular, has led to deforestation throughout the tropics, particularly in Indonesia and Brazil. It has also absorbed land that could be used to grow food or capture carbon. “We basically opened the floodgates,” Searchinger said.
Ethanol has failed to meet its climate promises for a number of reasons, which some researchers believe are mostly related to land use. Growing more corn means using more nitrogen fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Since 2007, fertilizer use tied to ethanol production has risen nationwide by up to 8 percent, according to the 2022 study denounced by the industry and DOE. More fields set aside for ethanol feedstocks also means less land for carbon-storing trees, climate-friendly food crops, or truly renewable energy sources like solar panels, which are far more efficient than plants at converting sunlight to power.
Still, many lawmakers, federal agencies, and the biofuel industry continue to insist that ethanol is better for the climate than gasoline. A 2021 DOE report found that the greenhouse gas emissions from grain-based ethanol can be as much as 52 percent lower than gasoline. With more climate-friendly growing practices, that could reach 70 percent, according to a 2018 study funded by the Department of Agriculture.
“There’s been a lot of talk — and a lot of confusion — recently about corn ethanol’s carbon footprint,” Renewable Fuels Association CEO Geoff Cooper wrote in a blog post last year. He criticized what he called a “flawed and misleading approach to examining ethanol’s carbon footprint” and said that corn ethanol has a 46 percent smaller footprint than gasoline. That number comes from a 2021 analysis by researchers at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But ethanol critics say such calculations don’t accurately account for the entire ethanol production cycle, from cultivation to processing, and underestimate the emissions caused by land-use changes associated with ethanol.
“The studies that look at the full life cycle of production and use of ethanol suggest that it results in increased greenhouse gas emissions relative to gasoline. [And] it doesn’t lead to lower emissions that affect air quality — say, particulates. In fact, they’re higher,” Hill said.
Aside from ethanol’s environmental consequences, questions linger over its future in an increasingly electrified world. In 2011, there were 22,000 EVs on U.S. roads. Ten years later, there were 2 million. One in five cars sold around the world this year will be electric, the International Energy Agency reported last week. As electric vehicles become more popular, “you are going to see the ethanol industry looking for ways to sustain itself, and probably sustainable aviation fuel is going to be their big push,” said Aaron Smith, an agricultural economist at University of California, Davis and a co-author of the 2022 study critical of ethanol.
The Department of Energy says ethanol jet fuel could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 153 percent compared to its petroleum counterpart. Hill said it has the same problems as the ethanol used to power cars. “There’s no reason to think they’re any different,” he said.
Yet two years ago, the Biden administration set a goal of producing 3 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel by 2030. Just last month, two House Democrats — Julia Brownley of California and Brad Schneider of Illinois — reintroduced the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Act, which would authorize $1 billion of federal funds to spur growth in the industry. To qualify for the subsidies, fuels must emit 50 percent fewer greenhouse gasses during their life cycle than oil-based jet fuel. Only time will tell if the new use of ethanol delivers the future the fuel’s supporters have long promised.
This Politico Magazine article on Ethanol, also by Michael Grunwald, gets deep into the politics around Ethanol–Ed
For a while, it looked like Iowa’s favorite corn subsidy might be in jeopardy. But even the newly green Democrats are lining up in favor.
March 05, 2019
Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.
Every four years, presidential candidates make pilgrimages to Iowa and preach the gospel of ethanol, the corn-based fuel that pours nearly $5 billion into the state’s economy every year.
This time, it looked like things might really be different.
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In 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa’s Republican caucus as a heretic, arguing that the Renewable Fuels Standard—the federal policy that requires billions of gallons of ethanol to be mixed into American gasoline—was a boondoggle. Among Democrats, meanwhile, the incentive to kowtow to the rural Iowans who love ethanol has faded; the party has lost most of its support in farm country, and its new early state primary schedule could reduce Iowa’s importance in 2020. And heading into the 2020 primaries, as the candidates rush to declare climate change an emergency and embrace an aggressive “Green New Deal” to fight it, ethanol has lost its luster as a green fuel, as scientific evidence mounts that it’s intensifying the climate problem rather than helping to solve it.
“This should be an early test of whether candidates are really committed to attacking the climate crisis,” says Scott Faber, an Environmental Working Group lobbyist who focuses on agricultural issues. “You can’t be for the status quo with ethanol and also be for saving the planet.”
So far, though, it looks like the status quo is going to prevail: Every leading 2020 Democrat who has taken a position on ethanol is for it.
Democrats still seem to think they can revive their brand in farm country by pledging allegiance to the government’s long-standing efforts to prop up ethanol. Iowa is America’s top ethanol producer, with 44 plants that help support more than 40,000 jobs, and so far none of the Democrats competing there have broken the faith.
Some of the Democrats were never going to buck King Corn. Farm-state candidates like Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sherrod Brown of Ohio have touted their long-standing support for the Renewable Fuel Standard. Vice President Joe Biden also supported a robust RFS before and during his time in Barack Obama’s administration, and he’s given no indication that would change if he runs. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an anti-establishment iconoclast who once criticized ethanol mandates for their “negative impact on farmers and consumers,” already flip-flopped when he ran for president in 2016; he now calls ethanol “an economic lifeline to rural and farm communities in Iowa and throughout the Midwest.”
Urban Democrats like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a climate activist who once dismissed ethanol as morally and environmentally indefensible “unless what you’re trying to do is help the people in Iowa,” now say it makes sense as a transitional fuel until electric vehicles are more widely available. A spokeswoman for New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who in the past has criticized biofuels derived from food crops as economically and environmentally problematic, says she now “supports the Renewable Fuels Standard and the full range of biofuels it is designed to promote.” Some environmentalists see California Senator Kamala Harris as the most likely to stand apart from the field by taking on the RFS, but she hasn’t taken a public position and her office did not respond to requests for comment.
It might seem counterintuitive that Democratic candidates would focus more on rural voters who are trending Republican than environmental voters who are key to their base. But support for ethanol is a top priority for agricultural communities, while opposition to ethanol is far down the list of priorities for environmental groups. And Iowa political operatives believe that because Democrats have done so badly in the economically depressed rural areas that helped Trump flip their state red in 2016, they feel even greater political pressure to embrace ethanol in 2020.
“Democrats are doing really well in Iowa’s urban areas, but we’re getting hammered in the countryside,” says Patty Judge, a Democrat who served as Iowa’s agriculture secretary and lieutenant governor. “Prudent candidates are going to talk about our home-grown ethanol industry and all the good jobs it creates.”
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In Washington, the perennial war over the RFS has pitted the corn lobby against the petroleum lobby, and ethanol boosters argue that now is a perfect time for Democrats to stand with beleaguered family farmers against Big Oil. Trump, who pledged to support the industry as a candidate in Iowa, has been an inconsistent ally in office. He’s defended the farm-friendly ethanol mandates in the RFS, and has even proposed to expand them in the summer months. But his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the petroleum advocate Scott Pruitt, handed out numerous waivers to help small refiners dodge the mandates to mix ethanol into the fuel they sell, reducing domestic demand for ethanol—and Trump’s trade war with China has shriveled U.S. ethanol exports.
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Even in Iowa, ethanol is not nearly as important an energy source as wind, which now provides more than a third of the state’s electricity. But politically, supporting it has become a way to pledge allegiance to the struggling rural towns that have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent years. Democrats flipped two Iowa congressional seats blue in 2018, thanks to impressive gains in cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, but rural voters helped Republicans retain the governor’s office and racially incendiary GOP Rep. Steve King retain his seat despite the national Democratic wave.
Trump won Iowa by 9 points after Barack Obama won it by 6 points, and Obama’s agriculture secretary, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, says Democrats desperately need to convince rural voters they’re as serious about revitalizing agricultural communities as they’ve been about helping inner cities if they want to flip back his state—and Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan with it.
“A lot of the caucuses will be held in the kind of small towns that benefit from ethanol jobs,” Vilsack said. “You don’t have to embrace ethanol for the sake of embracing ethanol, but you’ve got to have a plan for rural America.”
Two of every five stalks of corn grown in Iowa are sold to ethanol producers, so any move to limit federal support for ethanol could have a damaging effect on local farmers as well as towns that depend on farm incomes. And traditionally, there’s been little political downside to supporting a local industry, which is why limited-government Republicans like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich walked back their previous opposition to ethanol perks when they ran in Iowa. Cruz, a Texan with deep ties to the oil industry, did win despite his opposition to ethanol, but Iowa Republicans usually back conservative ideologues like Cruz, and locals believe he could have gotten much more than 28 percent if he had softened a bit on biofuels. They also believe that by proclaiming his loyalty to ethanol in the caucus, Trump helped pave the way for his comfortable Iowa victory in the general.
In recent Iowa cycles, Democrats have been even more eager to please. As a farm-state senator touting his pro-biofuel voting record, Obama portrayed Hillary Clinton’s embrace of ethanol in 2008 as an election-year conversion of convenience. Clinton then made similar comments after Sanders discovered the upside of ethanol in 2016. This year’s crop of Democratic candidates seem to be putting particular emphasis on winning back farm country—and in a recent survey commissioned by Focus on Rural America, 70 percent of Iowa Democrats said it was very important that a candidate support “cleaner-burning renewable fuels like ethanol.”
But if supporting ethanol is still politically correct in Iowa, it’s not necessarily politically indispensable. That poll found that even more Iowa Democrats felt strongly that their candidate should try to heal the racial and partisan divide (91 percent), stand up for the middle class (88 percent) and lead the fight against climate change (89 percent).
It’s on that last front that ethanol seems the most vulnerable. Over the past decade, a growing body of climate science has complicated the politics by suggesting that ethanol is not really a “cleaner-burning fuel.” It was once considered an eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels, because even though manufacturing it and driving with it spews carbon into the atmosphere, growing corn plants sucks carbon out of the atmosphere. But newer studies that take a wider view of its impact have found that the land-use changes triggered by using productive farmland to grow fuel can end up increasing overall emissions: Taking an acre out of food production creates demand for additional land to replace that food, and the acreage that gets converted tends to be forests and other natural lands that store more carbon than corn fields.
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For example, University of Wisconsin researchers used satellite imagery to document that after the Renewable Fuels Standard was enacted in 2005 and then expanded in 2007, U.S. cropland expanded by nearly 7 million acres over the next five years, releasing the carbon equivalent of 20 million additional cars on the road by chewing up grasslands. Seth Spawn, a geographer who worked on the study, says there’s evidence that biofuels can be helpful to the climate if the raw materials are grown on marginal land or derived from waste products, but not when they’re harvested from the fertile croplands of the Midwest. “The research generally shows that if biofuels are done wrong, it’s worse than not doing them at all,” Spawn says.
Tim Searchinger, a Princeton research scholar whose biofuels analyses have been published in journals like Science and Nature, says the basic problem is that land is very good at growing corn and storing carbon, but very inefficient at producing energy; solar cells can produce 100 times as much energy from the same acreage as corn ethanol. This is why Al Gore, who supported ethanol as a politician, now calls it “a mistake,” and why Gillibrand once pushed for biofuels brewed from noncrop feedstocks like shrub willow “as alternatives to gas and corn-based ethanol.”
The RFS is supposed to promote these so-called advanced biofuels as well as corn ethanol, but they haven’t taken off, and green groups that used to advocate for alternative fuels have shifted their focus to electric vehicles that are getting cheaper every year. Lukas Ross, a policy analyst for Friends of the Earth’s political arm, says Democrats who call for emergency action to protect the climate will look like hypocrites if they also protect old-school biofuel boondoggles.
“How can a Democratic candidate go to Iowa on Monday as an ethanol booster and then talk seriously on Tuesday about a Green New Deal?” Ross asks.
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It’s a delicate line to walk, and the activists behind the Green New Deal are walking it carefully, too, clamoring for government largesse for farmers who take actions to reduce carbon emissions but remaining largely silent on the question of ethanol. The initial resolution proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) merely outlined an ambitious set of goals for emission reductions, without detailing how those goals would be met. A “greenprint” for eventual legislation floated by the liberal group Data for Progress had more specifics, and while it did not include support for ethanol, only “the next generation of biofuels,” it did not call for rolling back support for ethanol, either.
And it did float the idea of lucrative incentives for farmers to manage their soil, fertilizer and manure in ways that reduce emissions, and to install wind turbines and solar panels on their land. Greg Carlock, the group’s policy director, conceded that the ethanol issue is politically awkward, and that trying to force Democrats to bash a popular industry could be a counterproductive distraction from bigger battles over fossil fuels, carbon regulations and the Green New Deal itself.
“The tendency will be to try to avoid that conversation unless you absolutely have to have it,” Carlock says. “If ethanol is as bad as the science is telling us, we’ve got to get off it or start doing it sustainably. And that’s hard for Iowans to hear.”
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The science is still disputed, and some studies suggest modern agricultural techniques that waste less energy, conserve more soil and produce more corn on less land can improve ethanol’s carbon math; boosters point out that the liberal state of California’s low-carbon fuel standard credits ethanol with reducing emissions somewhat compared with gasoline, even when accounting for land-use changes. Monte Shaw, director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, acknowledges that “somewhat cleaner than gasoline” won’t produce the deep decarbonization envisioned by the Green New Deal, but he says the dream of an all-electric fleet is still a long way off.
“We’ve improved phenomenally over the last two decades, and the internal combustion engine isn’t going away for the next two decades,” Shaw says. “We don’t expect Democrats to say, ‘Wow, biofuels are the answer to everything.’ But when they take time to talk to Iowans and tour the plants, we think they’ll say, ‘Hey, ethanol isn’t as terrible as all those wacky environmental groups say.’”
In an interview with WHO-TV in Des Moines, Booker tried to occupy a middle ground that could become common ground for Democrats, endorsing federal efforts to boost biofuels but warning that U.S. transportation will eventually go electric. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he said. “So right now, I support ethanol, I support our farmers. But know, this transition is coming.” He then pivoted to talk about other ways to help family farmers deal with low prices and Trump’s tariffs.
“Biofuels are a big issue in Iowa, and so is climate,” says state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price. “They’re both going to be part of the conversation.”
Farms and pastures produce about a quarter of the world’s carbon problem. But as Vilsack points out, rural areas can also be a big part of the carbon solution, because “if you want to sequester carbon, you need soil, a plant, or a tree.” Seth Watkins, who grows corn and raises cattle on his 3,000-acre family farm in Clarinda, Iowa, is part of a burgeoning movement of farmers who are trying to lighten their impact on the land and on the climate, planting cover crops to reduce soil erosion, minimizing his use of fertilizers and fossil fuels, restoring natural buffers around rivers and streams, trying to work with nature rather than against it.
“Our job is to care for the land, to make sure the resources are here for future generations,” Watkins says. “That means getting serious about climate change.”
Watkins has mixed feelings about corn ethanol. There’s no doubt that the government mandates have helped create demand and boost grain prices, keeping some independent family farms in business and encouraging some young people to stay in agriculture. He even feeds his cattle with ethanol byproducts. But he’s seen more and more marginal land converted into resource-intensive farmland without seeing any real stabilization of farm incomes, and he doesn’t think it’s sustainable. He’s surprised that so far, even as the Democratic candidates have rallied around the Green New Deal with apocalyptic rhetoric, none of them has been willing to take on the ethanol lobby in the name of protecting the earth.
“Our landscape has been decimated by good intentions,” says Watkins, who ran for state Senate in 2014 as a Republican, but now considers himself a Democrat. “I know nobody around here wants to hear that ethanol is a problem, but the only politician who had the guts to say no was Ted Cruz. How sad is that?”
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