“Green” aviation fuels increase carbon emissions

But this is the power of US agricultural profits, increasingly worried that electric vehicles will crush demand for corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel on the roads, and are fiercely lobbying Washington to create new demand in the sky. If there is confusion about the purpose of the biofuel provision, it is not in the Energy Policy section of the big beautiful bill. It is in the section that claims to “grow rural areas again.”

The political twist is that it’s not just a Republican rule. While the bill does not have Democrat supporters, even some Republicans are opposed to attacks on other energy subsidies, the biofuel carveout has strong support from farm-friendly Democrats who created the SAF’s original tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. When Biden dismantled climate policy and extended Trump’s tax cuts, its biofuel language was released from bipartisanship.Flying farm“The bill explicitly designed to qualify for SAF credits of up to $1.75 per gallon in ethanol.

“It’s shocking, but not surprising,” says Danrashoff, a climate scientist and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. “There are very oily lobbying aircraft in agriculture, so even if Congress encourages all of these things that cut emissions and save money, Congress will spend a lot of money expanding one thing that increases emissions.”

The impact on the global landscape can be dramatic. an analysis According to the American Enterprise Institute, if around 10% of US jet fuel is produced from SAF by 2030, if explicit Biden management goals are needed, about half of US soy crops are needed, occupying enough farmland to cover Nebraska. Princeton senior researcher Tim Sarchlinger calculated that using vegetable oils like soybeans requires 40% of the world’s farmland, a region twice the size of India, which is what is needed for a quarter of the world’s aviation fuel. Flying a plane with corn ethanol is particularly inefficient. 1.7 gallons of ethanol are needed to make gallons of jet fuel. Ethanol production uses almost as many fossil fuels as ethanol replaces it.

The world has already lost forests that correspond to the tropical forests of soccer fields every six seconds, and most of them have led to agriculture expansion, increasing demand for raw materials such as corn, soybeans, canola and palm. The European Union specifically ruled out crop-based fuel use for aviation because the impact of land use is so devastating, but even if Biden was still president, the US farm lobby was fighting to make sure it didn’t happen here.

At one Biden Cabinet meeting in 2023, Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack handed over a one-page briefing document to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, flagging it as a more of a matter of priority. Yellen’s high-priority issues usually involved in inflation, the threat of a recession and a global economic crisis, which confused me to read the biofuel industry’s issues page, which includes acronyms on the methodological advantage of the Corsian Model’s Greeting Computer Model for calculating carbon footprints from the ILUC.

“Can someone tell me what this is?” she later asked her top aide.

This is because the Corsia model focused adequately on “indirect land use,” known as ILUC, preventing crop-based aviation fuels from being subject to tax credits, and the farm-friendly greeting model downplayed ILUC, which was downplayed enough to make corn and soybeans look sustainable. The stakes of this technical debate were so high that Biden Climate Emperor John Podesta led a bravely named sustainable aviation fuel lifecycle analysis between interagency working groups to have it.

As I’ll be talking about in future books We are eating the earththe working group held a weekly meeting on improvements in climate analysis rather than justifying the creation of a lucrative new market for farmers. “No one ever talked about the elephant in the room,” recalled an official from the administration. “It was an absurd theater.”

Greeting modelling implies that while converting all of Iowa’s corn production into ethanol, farmers on Earth can be sought to expand fields and expand more grains, but when Biden declared that he “want to see a facility like Midwest” with Iowa ethanol plants, the results didn’t have to be meaningless.

In 2024, the Biden administration agreed to use greetings. Even the greetings didn’t seem to be climate friendly enough to qualify for the credit, so Vilsack secured some additional conditions that would further favor the fuel grown on the farm. He barely pretends that even a decision was decided by science in his official statement, calling it “a great beginning in developing new markets for our country’s agricultural crops.” In 2007, the first US biofuel mandate of the automobile unleashed the A Deforestation Torrent On Amazon, Nikita Pabrenko, director of fuel and aviation for the United Nations for clean transport, says the impact of the farm lobby in Washington persuaded the White House to ignore the fear of reprise. “We spent two years fighting,” he says.

Today, only 0.3% of the world’s aviation fuels are classified as sustainable. Most of them are truly climate-friendly recycled cooking oils, as they don’t use farmland or spur deforestation. United Airlines has an advertising campaign featuring Oscar the Grouch as “Chief Garbage,” promoting its commitment to creating SAFs from waste instead of crop-growing ingredients. Environmentalists also want the plane to fly with “green hydrogen,” produced with clean energy. Pongamia Oil Made from climate-friendly tropical tree seeds. At least electricity on short flights.

However, for airlines, the most scalable alternative fuel opportunity is subsidized crop-based fuels. So they expanded their safe credit to the current council and joined the farm’s profits to ensure that farm-grown SAFs were eligible. The Biden team had already reduced the role of indirect land use changes in emissions analysis. Critics say that its ILUC was worth at least five times higher, and perhaps 40 times higher – and the US has already built enough biological environments since 2021 to increase production capacity by six times. Still, industry lobbyists wanted to make sure that ILUC poses no threat to burn fuel brewed from crops. And they got what is on page 208 of the big beautiful bill.

This is like determining to Congress that when financial regulators determine whether they are a solvent or not, they cannot see how much creditors owe. One environmentalist compared this provision to a legislative decree with a PI equal to nine.

“There’s a lot of hype about how this kind of law can jump SAFs and make a lot of money for farmers. I think that’s right,” says Dan Blaustyin Leit, who runs the Brais-Thru Institute’s Food and Agriculture Program. “I just don’t think it’s good.”

Abraham Lincoln loved to tell riddles: If you call the tail the legs, how many legs does a dog have? His answer was four. Even if you call it a leg, the tail is still a tail. Additionally, growing fuel using farmland will induce expansion of farmland elsewhere to grow more food, even if emission analysts are not allowed to acknowledge these indirect land use changes. A brave ban even assessing indirect land use changes can cause problems for airlines that want to sell carbon credits to use alternative fuels. Sustainable Aviation Buyer AllianceJeff Bezos is funded, and we are working with the Environmental Group to ensure that the credits are scientifically reliable. However, it is not clear whether buyers like Microsoft and Meta really care about scientific reliability.

In any case, biofuel lobbies tend to go down the road in Washington. The Biden administration issued an “emergency exemption” last summer to allow more ethanol to be blended into gasoline, and the Trump administration plans to issue the same exemption this summer. The first particular item mentioned by the Trump White House in a May 8 press release was an increase in US ethanol access, honoring its reserve trade agreement with the UK, with congratulatory quotes from the US Grain Council, the Association of Renewable Fuels and the National Association of Corn Producers. These groups have many impacts, and it is difficult to imagine politicians plaguing them in the right way to assess indirect land use changes in life cycle analysis.

“It’s difficult to build a district to address issues that seem very technical,” says Rashov. “And even if you could, it’s even more difficult to fight the farm lobby.”