The EPA Raised the Renewable Fuels Standard. Here’s Why That Makes No Sense.

“More renewable” sounds like a good thing, but in this case it’s not.

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-68495788/stock-photo-gas-pump-nozzles-in-a-service-station.html?src=G74pyyt7rKwTdeu7bUpL5A-1-55">Take Photo</a>/Shutterstock


This story originally appeared in Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced how many gallons of transportation fuels will have to come from renewable sources in the next couple of years. The numbers are significantly higher than the agency had proposed earlier.

Since 2007, the Untied States has required that a percentage of the fuel we use for transportation come from biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel. That percentage is called the Renewable Fuels Standard, and it keeps increasing. The EPA decides how much.

“More renewable” sounds like a good thing, but in this case it’s not. Growing crops and then turning them into energy is just really inefficient—it drives more land into agricultural production (with all the attendant environmental problems) and is generally worse for climate change than plain old petroleum.

Of course, biofuels are good if you grow corn and soybeans or otherwise make money off the production of biofuels. As Donald Carr put it earlier on Grist, the Renewable Fuels Standard is “a government handout for those turning corn into fuel.”

The overwhelming majority of ethanol produced under the RFS is made from corn grain, which is currently more greenhouse-gas intensive than gasoline, according to the EPA. Ethanol also produces a lot more of the regular old dirty air pollution than petroleum fuel. As the National Research Council wrote: “Those projected air-quality effects from ethanol fuel would be more damaging to human health than those from gasoline use. This is particularly true for corn-grain ethanol.”

The EPA projects that, as the technology improves, more advanced forms of biofuels will be better than fossil fuels. But these projections are based on accounting mistakes that were baked into the science on biofuels early on, said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton.

“Any bioenergy that requires a dedicated land use is a bad idea,” he told me. It can work for waste, but otherwise the math just doesn’t work out.

“Any bioenergy that requires a dedicated land use is a bad idea.”

Some policymakers have suggested that we should get 20 percent of our energy from biofuels by 2050, but in a World Resources Institute Paper Searchinger calculated that “that amount…is roughly equivalent to the total amount of biomass people harvest today—all the crops, plant residues, and trees harvested by people for food, timber, and other uses, plus all the grass consumed by livestock around the world.”

There is an interesting squabble about how much biofuel we can realistically take into our vehicles. But when it comes down to it, most renewable fuels aren’t green now, and aren’t likely to be in the future.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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