President Biden should get rid of ethanol fuel

It is of course extremely unlikely that he'll do anything of the kind. That said, growing insane amounts of corn is bad. It's bad for the environment, for the climate, for farmers, and ultimately for everyone.

President Joe Biden campaigned on an ambitious plan to tackle climate change with a “clean energy revolution,” including incentives to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric ones. The growing consensus among climate experts is that to slash carbon emissions quickly enough, we need to eliminate as much air-fouling combustion as possible while expanding wind and solar energy to power the grid. But a key aspect of Biden’s agenda contradicts this push: He’s vowed to “promote ethanol and the next generation of biofuels,” declaring them “vital to the future of rural America—and the climate.” Biden tapped longtime ethanol champion Tom Vilsack—former governor of Iowa, the fuel’s Saudi Arabia—to run the Department of Agriculture, a post he held under Obama.

In doing so, Biden is doubling down on a bad idea that has flourished since the days of President George W. Bush...

From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the renewable fuel standard has been a bust, says Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering. By displacing petroleum, the ethanol mandate made conventional gasoline cheaper, which made people drive more while buying less-fuel-efficient vehicles. As a result, Hill and two colleagues found in a 2016 paper, the net effect of the law was to increase greenhouse gas emissions from cars by about 22 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to the output of nearly six coal-fired power plants.

The environmental footprint of industrial-scale corn farming is another stain on ethanol’s claim to be a green fuel. Corn typically covers about 90 million acres of farmland—an area nearly the size of California. Fertilizing the crop emits nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon, as well as nitrate pollution that fouls water from the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, where it generates a low-oxygen dead zone larger than Connecticut. Hill and his colleagues have found that nitrogen fertilizer applied to corn also results in emissions of ammonia, a powerful pollutant, that have been associated with a staggering 4,300 premature deaths yearly in the United States. - Mother Jones