Transcript
A tweet by some news company saying “Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.” It has a link to an article and a picture of a bowl of rice. It has a quote saying “Should I just die”
A tweet by some news company saying “Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.” It has a link to an article and a picture of a bowl of rice. It has a quote saying “Should I just die”
Which is a good point to keep in mind when people claim there isn’t enough land for solar panels.
Even by extremely optimistic assumptions, bioethanol barely helps. It’s entirely a corn farming subsidy combined with oil companies pretending their product can be clean. Here’s a rundown:
https://youtu.be/F-yDKeya4SU
Oh, I have another bone to pick with those people. I know a perfect place for solar panels. Take this satellite photo of a completely random part of Kansas:
The circular irrigation system leaves the corners unused. That’s 21% of the square’s area, wasted.
(edit) I’m not a civil engineer, and I know that putting solar panels and supporting infrastructure so close to a water spray has its own problems, but that is still way too large an area over all of the arable land in North America to just leave unused.
In places that are densely farmed like this, those corner areas are not necessarily wasted. They are the only places that are not monocultures.
Meanwhile, in China.
And even if they can’t have solar, they can probably have windmills. We need a combination of the two.
Idk about corn, here it is often made from biowaste
How does a 66% reduction in co2 emitted per fuel gallon used barely help? Sure it’s not the perfect ideal solution, but it is better to burn carbon neutral energy to get around than fossil fuels. Electric vehicles powered by renewables like solar would be better, but that won’t happen overnight since that requires replacing millions of vehicles.
Now count how much CO2 was emitted during the production and transportation of that biofuel.
Here’s a link to the study the above YouTube vid is based on: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101084119
Ok, I can see how factoring in (or not) land use changes could make a big difference in the numbers. I would however, attribute the cause of that to the poor policy put in place by the governmental bodies not an inherit factor of biofuel production. The subsidies put in place to encourage corn production in particular are unfair and could be the factor leading to those land use changes. I can see how policies boosting the price and lowering the risk of planting corn would lead to land being moved from somewhat natural prarieland or forest to cropland. I might take a more in depth look at both the studies later to compare them.
Ok, here is a study that does factor land use change and transportation, and it is still about a 50% percent reduction. Corn ethanol emits 46% less greenhouse gases than gasoline. The land use changes referenced in the paper you linked seem a lot higher than most other sources I have seen. It makes me question whether they are calculating it accurately. I am no expert on how they should be calculated, but why is there a 30-40g co2 per MJ fuel produced difference in between the different studies? The figures I see in other studies are around ~5g co2 per MJ fuel not 38g.
Where does this figure come from? Is this in regards to e70 / e90 fuel or normal e10?
For the latter, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible.
I wasn’t referring to a specific fuel, I meant per amount of energy used it emits 66% percent less co2 since ethanol production in the US has a ~3x return on fossil fuel investment. I am basing the figure on the same source on the energy return on energy invested balance I used in my other comment in the thread. Here is the source.
It doesn’t matter the mix it is in, since it takes the equivalent of 1 gallon of fossil energy and outputs 3x as much cleanish bioenergy. If it is E10 it would take 10 gallons before 1 gallon of ethanol was used, but that 1 gallon of ethanol would result in a third of the CO2 emissions compared to gasoline fuel.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks.