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Canary Media’s “Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.
In late March, President Donald Trump dramatically expanded the federal mandates for farm-grown biofuels in cars, trucks, and tractors. In front of a cheering crowd that he called “the single largest gathering of farmers the White House has ever seen,” Trump announced his Environmental Protection Agency will require record amounts of soy-based biodiesel and corn-based ethanol to be blended into petroleum-based diesel and gasoline.
Like most of Trump’s environmental policies, and almost all biofuels policies, it’s terrible — for consumers, the climate, the hungry, and the country.
By diverting food crops into fuel and inflating demand for grain and vegetable oil, Trump’s jacked-up mandates will increase food prices, food shortages, and food insecurity. They’ll also accelerate deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, inducing the world’s farmers to clear tens of millions of acres of new fields to exploit the higher prices for their crops. At the same time, they’ll inflate demand for fertilizer that’s already in short supply because of the Iran war, further increasing global food prices as well as corn-country pollution.
This is all bad. It’s morally unconscionable to reroute crops from bellies to cars when the grain it takes to fill the average gas tank could feed one of the world’s 150 million undernourished children for a month. It’s environmentally and economically nutty to use good farmland to grow ethanol when an acre of solar panels produces 20 to 100 times more energy than an acre of corn. The world is on track to deforest a land mass nearly twice the size of India for agriculture by 2050, and biofuels are a remarkably inefficient use of increasingly scarce soil.
But as I wrote in this space four years ago when President Joe Biden was promoting biofuels during a global food crisis, the badness is bipartisan; few Democrats oppose aggressive government support for farm-grown fuels. The badness is global, too; Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, and other nations are ratcheting up incentives for crop-based fuels for cars and trucks. There’s also a growing worldwide effort to run planes on farm-grown “sustainable aviation fuel,” including generous subsidies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed last year.
Really, the only unique aspect of the biofuel badness at Trump’s White House “Celebration of Agriculture” was his candor about its purpose: to shovel cash to farmers, his most loyal voting bloc and America’s most powerful lobbying force.
He didn’t really pretend he was trying to give consumers relief from exorbitant gas prices or reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, the industry’s current arguments for stuffing more crops into fuel tanks. He certainly didn’t pretend he was trying to help the planet; in fact, he exulted about all the regulatory “environmental nonsense” he’s gutted to save farmers money. He didn’t even pretend he was simply trying to ensure farmers a level playing field; he boasted about all the special treatment he’s given them, including “massive new loan guarantees,” a huge bailout to offset his tariffs —“I just gave you $12 billion!” — and lucrative tax breaks that “only Trump could’ve gotten you.”
“I’m actually giving you much better than a level playing field!” he proclaimed.
This agri-pandering isn’t unusual, even if Trump is unusually brazen about it. In Washington, D.C., it’s almost mandatory to describe farmers as “hardworking patriots” with “heartland values” while showering them with lavish subsidies, grants, cut-rate loans, price supports, and other agricultural welfare. The Beltway’s relentless efforts to prop up crop-based fuels, which would have no hope of competing with conventional fuels without government help, are the ultimate proof that Big Ag has even more political clout than Big Oil.
But Trump is taking the badness to a new level. While his slogan may be America First, his Agriculture Department’s slogan is Farmers First. Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, the researcher who exposed biofuels as a deforestation disaster in a 2008 Science paper, estimates the EPA’s new blending requirements will ultimately expand global cropland by at least 28 million acres, an area the size of Ohio.
Two decades ago, when there were no viable alternatives to fossil energy and a documentary called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” was chronicling how General Motors literally scrapped its first alternative vehicles, crop-based fuels looked like the renewable future of transportation. But ever since Searchinger and others showed that those fuels are much worse for the climate than gasoline, and a new generation of electric cars proved to be much better, the federal Renewable Fuel Standard has merely reflected Washington’s determination to increase farm incomes by increasing farm commodity prices. In case there was any doubt about his motives at his Celebration of Agriculture, Trump also canceled a Biden administration effort to extend the Renewable Fuel Standard to electric vehicles, which would have helped the cause of cleaner transportation but not the cause of wealthier farmers.
Again, though, the problem is much bigger than Trump. The world devotes 125 million acres of cropland — an area larger than California — to growing biofuels. (The area is actually even larger, but biofuel production does create useful by-products like animal feed that affect the land accounting.) A recent paper concluded that in Indonesia and Malaysia alone, global demand for biodiesel drove an area of tropical forest larger than Connecticut to be converted into oil palm plantations between 2002 and 2018 — and Indonesia’s own biofuels targets contributed to a 66% jump in deforestation there just last year. Searchinger says that meeting the 2030 biofuels targets already set by major countries would require an additional land mass larger than New Mexico; meeting the International Energy Agency’s global goal of more than doubling biofuel production by 2030 could require another California.
The IEA also envisions a massive surge in renewable fuels in aviation and shipping, from less than 1% of global markets to as much as 15%, a recipe for an almost unfathomable assault on nature. The industry hopes to run half the world’s planes and ships on crops by 2050, which could require new farm fields eight times the size of California. Put another way, nearly one-third of the world’s cropland would be needed to generate a mere 2% of the world’s energy.
I’ve been banging my spoon on my high chair about the badness of biofuels since 2008, when I wrote a Time cover story on corn ethanol headlined “The Clean Energy Scam.” Honestly, the policy arguments are starting to bore me. It’s no longer news that producing biofuels can require nearly as much fossil fuel as they replace. It’s just common sense that when one farm grows fuel instead of food, another farm will expand to grow more food — usually into a carbon-rich forest or wetland, not a parking lot. I spend 50 pages of my latest book, “We Are Eating the Earth,” documenting the various ways scientists, economists, and bureaucrats in Washington, California, the European Union, and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have cooked the books of climate analyses to make biofuels mandates look less catastrophic.
Nevertheless, farm-state Democrats like Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois continue to tout biofuels as greener alternatives to fossil fuels. California under Gov. Gavin Newsom has promoted crop-based fuels through its “Low Carbon Fuel Standard,” even though corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are much higher-carbon than gasoline or conventional diesel. And while a few environmental groups have denounced Trump’s latest favors for the industry, most of the environmental community has remained silent, even as they’ve trashed Trump’s other environmental sins.
I get it. Fighting the farm lobby can feel like a waste of time and political capital. But biofuels are an excellent fight to pick, and now that they’re poised for a gigantic growth spurt in the U.S. and abroad, this would be an excellent time to pick it. Most farmers don’t vote for Democrats anyway. Agricultural expansion is an enormous environmental problem, driving biodiversity loss, nutrient pollution, water shortages, and climate change. And at a time when Americans are furious about high food prices — which helped Trump get elected, and have helped make him unpopular — biofuels mandates are specifically designed to increase the cost of things farmers sell and consumers buy.
None of this will persuade Trump or his Republican lackeys, who don’t care about the climate or the rainforests and won’t do anything to offend their farmer base or agribusiness donors. But it is way past time for serious people who know that biofuels are an insidious boondoggle to start fighting to stop the madness. I’m specifically thinking of three groups that should suit up for battle:
Democrats. There used to be a lot of rural Democrats. There also used to be a deal in Washington: Urban Democrats supported biofuels and other farm goodies as long as Republicans supported food stamps. But rural America is now overwhelmingly Republican, and the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act blew up the deal, gutting food stamps while blasting even more cash into farm socialism; it even included language ensuring biofuels could still qualify for new subsidies no matter how much they expanded agriculture into nature. So why do Democrats continue to support these environment-wrecking handouts for rich farmers who will never vote for them? Maybe it’s understandable that a corn-state Democrat like Klobuchar is now clamoring to permanently increase the ethanol levels in U.S. gasoline from 10% to 15% in order to cushion the blow from soaring gas prices — though she was clamoring for that long before gas prices were soaring — but why isn’t the rest of the party saying no?
Democrats need a new approach to agriculture, focused less on the 1% of Americans who farm and more on the 100% who eat. That would mean redistributing less money from ordinary taxpayers to the biggest farmers who grow the most common row crops, while also opposing the tariffs, price supports, and biofuel mandates that raise prices at the supermarket. Let Trump stand for giving farmers “much better than a level playing field.” Democrats should stand with everybody else.
Environmentalists. Green groups enthusiastically supported the original Renewable Fuel Standard in 2005, back when biofuels looked like an eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels. To their credit, most of them stopped pushing farm-grown fuels after Searchinger’s science revealed their downsides. European enviros have actually fought back, successfully limiting crop-based fuels on the continent’s roads and excluding them from “sustainable aviation” mandates. But while a few American groups have also sounded alarms — most notably Friends of the Earth, Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the World Resources Institute — most have been silent, or have lobbied for relatively modest tweaks to state and federal mandates. I found no mention of Trump’s latest expanded biofuels mandate on the websites of the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, or Environmental Defense Fund, even though it will have a big impact on natural resources, wildlife, and the environment.
This strategy is designed to avoid alienating the powerful farm lobby, even though Big Ag routinely fights environmentalists over climate, wetlands, toxic chemicals, and other issues. And the strategy hasn’t entirely backfired; although biofuels quickly seized about 3% of the global fuel market by 2010, their market share has remained stagnant ever since. But that’s mostly because of the rise of electric vehicles, and the new push for biofuels in planes and ships, which can’t be easily electrified, is a huge new threat to nature and the climate. That’s what enviros are supposed to fight for, even if it means fighting Big Ag.
International institutions. In “We Are Eating the Earth,” I quote several scientists who worked on IPCC reports complaining that their panels were stacked with biofuels advocates who fought desperately to make sure the fuels were endorsed as climate solutions. Someone could write a whole book about that alone, but the long story short is that IPCC reports tend to point out that critics believe crop-based biofuels won’t reduce emissions at all, while supporters believe biofuels can reduce ludicrously massive amounts of emissions — and then suggest the world should aim for something in between to achieve its net-zero goals, which still amounts to a pro-biofuels stance. The IEA and other global institutions have taken a similar approach.
The scientists who still claim biofuels are good for the climate tend to assume they’ll make food so expensive that poor people won’t be able to afford as much meat, which would be bad; or that higher crop prices will miraculously enable farmers to grow way more crops without using more land, which isn’t grounded in empirical reality; or that farmers who do clear more land will somehow avoid carbon-rich forests, which is more wishful thinking. The science is clear, even if it isn’t comforting. It’s true that net-zero will be much harder to achieve if we can’t assume emissions reductions from biofuels. Unfortunately, we can’t, and the sooner credible institutions recognize that, the better.
So that’s my advice. Democrats should stop trying to suck up to farmers who will never love them back. Enviros should stop shying away from a war with Washington’s most powerful lobby. And climate institutions should abandon the most politically popular climate solution even though it will make climate progress look even less achievable.
I can’t pretend that any of this will be easy. If it were, it would’ve happened already. The fact that biofuels are crass political payoffs is one of those things just about everybody in Washington knows but hardly anybody wants to try to change. I’m genuinely not sure change is possible, but I’m sure it won’t happen if nobody tries.
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