A Big Beautiful Scandal
Using corn ethanol as a jet fuel doesn't pencil out for the climate, so the Republican Party's Big Beautiful Bill will take away the government's pencils.
“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.”
That’s the lede of my new piece in Yale e360, but wait, it gets worse. Not only would a bill that’s slashing $1 trillion worth of real clean energy subsidies spend an extra $45 billion on “Sustainable Aviation Fuels,” it would ban the government from doing any real analysis of whether biofuels like corn ethanol are actually sustainable.
You can read the whole thing here.
The problem with farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel—forgive me if you’ve heard this phrase before—is that they’re eating the earth. They take good farmland out of food production, which ends up inducing farmers elsewhere to clear carbon-rich forests and wetlands to create new farmland to replace the lost food. Biofuels were generally considered climate-friendly alternatives to fossil fuels until 2008, when a paper in Science by a brilliant, obsessive, not-always-warm-and-cuddly wetlands lawyer named Tim Searchinger revealed that the carbon emissions that biofuels generate through “indirect land-use change” dwarf the emissions they prevent by displacing gasoline. He gave this phenomenon the clunky acronym ILUC—it’s pronounced eye-luck, and it’s now standard in climate analyses—and he documented how it completely flips the emissions math.
But the farm lobby loves the way government support for farm-grown fuels creates artificial demand for their crops—and now that electric vehicles are threatening demand for farm-grown automotive fuels, it’s particularly excited about farm-grown aviation fuels. And Congress likes making the farm lobby happy. So page 208 of the Big Beautiful Bill declares that any climate analysis of biofuels “shall be adjusted as necessary to exclude any emissions attributed to indirect land-use change.”
This is like declaring that any financial analysis of companies can’t look at their losses; one environmentalist told me it’s like a legislative fiat that pi equals nine. Searchinger has calculated that producing 25 percent of the world’s jet fuel from crops would require 40 percent of the world’s cropland. The resulting ILUC would doom the Amazon and the rain forests of Indonesia, so ignoring in a climate analysis does not make a ton of sense. And while the Big Beautiful Bill is a Republican outrage, the biofuels piece of it is bipartisan; the language was lifted from a “Farm to Fly” bill sponsored by corn-friendly Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
There’s a lot of money at stake. Inside the Biden White House, there was a high-level battle over (I swear I am not making this up) the proper methodology for calculating emissions from ILUC, involving Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and (seriously, this was a real thing) a Sustainable Aviation Fuel Lifecycle Analysis Interagency Working Group chaired by Biden climate czar John Podesta. The bottom line is that Vilsack (a former Iowa governor) and his farm-lobby friends won, getting the Biden Administration to embrace an absurd technical model that almost entirely ignored ILUC. But “almost entirely” still wasn’t quite good enough to get ethanol to pencil out as a jet fuel, so now Congress is basically trying to take away the government’s pencils.
I know this stuff sounds super-obscure. At one Biden Cabinet meeting, Vilsack gave Yellen a one-page document full of acronym-laden farm-lobby talking points about why the “GREET” model was superior to the “CORSIA” model for calculating ILUC; understandably baffled, she asked her team: “Can someone tell me what this is about?” What it was about was the future of aviation fuel, and maybe the fate of the climate. But while the stakes of these inside-baseball technical fights over life-cycle math are incredibly high, the public doesn’t get fired up about the boring details of climate analysis, so the fights happen behind closed doors and powerful lobbies win.
One reason I wrote a book about the race to feed the world without frying the world—please pre-order it here!—was to bring these fights out of the shadows, and to try to illustrate these issues in a non-boring way. Searchinger is the main character, and I tell the crazy story of his lonely crusade to challenge the scientific and environmental consensus that biofuels could help save the climate. Today, humanity uses a swath of land the size of Texas to grow fuel crops, but it would use a lot more than that if Searchinger hadn’t been such a pain in so many establishment asses.
The thing is, humanity uses 25 Texases worth of land to grow food crops, and 50 Texases worth of land to raise livestock. Agriculture is what’s really eating the earth, and Searchinger has dedicated the second half of his career to this eating-the-earth problem, becoming one of the world’s leading agriculture and climate analysts. Biofuels were just the start of an intellectual journey that ends up in our food.
I hope you’ll all read We Are Eating the Earth. (I also hope you’ll come see me launch it June 30 at the New York Public Library, in conversation with the great David Wallace-Wells.) I think it’s an inspiring story about integrity and tenacity, about the ways honest analysis and dogged persistence can help change the world. The pencils-down provision in the Big Beautiful Bill is just the latest reminder that honest analysis is not always welcome, and not always guaranteed. But we won’t solve our climate problems without it, which is another reason I wrote the book.
Hey what are your thoughts on perrenial biofuel feed stocks like switchgrass