this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Ethanol is the biggest environmental disaster in the United States. It takes two gallons of fossil fuels (counting fertilizer, transportation, and all other inputs) to make one gallon of ethanol - plus all the herbicides, pesticides, toxic fertilizer runoff, and all the other negative externalities of monocrop industrial agriculture - so a handful of Big Ag megacorps can get fat off subsidies at taxpayer expense.
51 million acres of farmland - an area the size of Nebraska - wasted turning fuel into less efficient fuel.
Of fucking course Trump and Biden found some way to make it worse.
I definitely agree the corn subsidies are wasteful and over-funded. Also I'm sure your well meaning, but the myth that it takes 2 gallons to produce 1 gallon of ethanol seems like misleading oil propaganda. What is your source on that claim?
Even corn ethanol (one of the worst ways to make ethanol) still produces 30% more energy than the energy used to produce it. And with better production practices, it could be a lot better (and might be right now since the numbers are somewhat old) than that. That means less pollution.
Country Type Energy balance
United States Corn ethanol 1.3
Germany Biodiesel 2.5
Brazil Sugarcane ethanol 8
United States Cellulosic ethanol† 2–36
Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel#Environment
I will admit my two-for-one claim is at the very lowest end of estimates - possibly slightly lower than the lowest end estimate - for corn ethanol efficiency. Though it's a snappy line and easier to remember than "1.6 gallons per gallon" or whatever.
But as the Wikipedia notes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance :
Bluntly, there's a lot of bad science around ethanol, for the obvious reason that both Big Ag and the US government are highly motivated to make corn subsidies look good and keep the money flowing.
But oil propaganda? Fucking lol. We need to phase out fossil fuels entirely. If anything, US ethanol production benefits oil companies - because ethanol is an additive to gasoline, Big Ag and Big Oil both benefit from keeping internal combustion engines on the road and slowing the transition to EVs.
So on the negative end: this 2005 study estimated corn ethanol consumed 29% more energy than it produced:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070809024158/http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/NRRethanol.2005.pdf
And though that study is old, and the Wikipedia page on ethanol energy balance goes out of its way to claim it's been discredited (gosh, I wonder who added that content), here's an article about a 2022 study finding similarly that corn based ethanol produces at least 24% more greenhouse gases than gasoline when all the impacts - including the expansion of farmland into previously undeveloped land, funded by ethanol subsidies - are taken into account:
https://grist.org/agriculture/despite-what-you-may-think-ethanol-isnt-dead-yet/
And then there's all the other negative externalities of expanding fucking cornfields.