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Topic: Ethanol

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[Episode #253] – Bioenergy Illusions

Jul 2 2025

Various biofuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and wood for power plants are labeled as renewable and carbon-neutral. But are they really?

If a farmer converts food-producing land to grow corn for ethanol, does that acre actually reduce carbon emissions? When trees are cut down to fire power plants, can we have confidence they'll be replanted quickly enough to deserve the "renewable" label?

Our guest in today's conversation has spent the past six years traveling around the world to research these questions, and he finds that the answer is nearly always 'no.'

Mike Grunwald, a veteran reporter and author who was our guest on this show in Episode #1, nearly ten years ago, has published a new book sharing the results of his extensive research into the many approaches that have been tried to produce bioenergy, reduce agricultural carbon emissions, increase crop yields, and modify consumer diets. Titled We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, it includes a comprehensive study of the bioenergy solutions that have been attempted and their unintended consequences.

This is a 'must-listen' episode for policymakers, investors, and anyone interested in bioenergy's true role in climate solutions.

Guest:

Michael Grunwald is a best-selling author and a widely acclaimed journalist. His latest book is We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.

Mike has covered policy and politics as a staff writer for The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and Politico Magazine. He’s won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, the Society of Environment Journalists award for in-depth reporting, and many other honors. He’s written scores of magazine cover stories, about everything from Time’s Man of the Year to the marketing of Barack Obama, and thousands of newspaper stories, including the Post’s lead news story about the September 11 attacks. His work now appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Canary Media, and other publications.

Mike’s previous books are The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (2006) and The New New Deal: The Hidden History of Change in the Obama Era (2012).

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-grunwald-70858313/

On Twitter: @MikeGrunwald

On Bluesky: @mikegrunwald.bsky.social

On the Web: Mike’s speaker profile at Simon & Schuster

Geek rating: 3

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[Episode #125] – Beyond Planet of the Humans

Jul 8 2020

Mini Episode

Planet of the Humans, by filmmakers Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs, and Ozzie Zehner, has been roundly criticized by everyone involved in energy transition, and rightly so, because it’s more than a decade out of date. But it did manage to confuse some people about the true state of energy transition, and misled them into believing that wind and solar are some kind of hoax perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by evil billionaires. Even worse, some opponents of energy transition started using the film for their own purposes.

But we think everyone—including the filmmakers themselves—rather missed the point of what the film was really about, which isn’t energy transition at all. It’s something else entirely.

In this episode, we speak with Dutch energy analyst Auke Hoekstra about how the film isn't actually about renewable energy at all by focusing on the entire worldview of the filmmakers. You may have read some critiques of the film already, but we guarantee you haven’t heard this take on it!

Geek rating: 3

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[Episode #59] – Lifecycle Assessment

Dec 27 2017

Mini Episode

When we need to compare the environmental consequences of energy technologies — between an internal combustion vehicle or an EV, or between a compact natural gas generator and a big wind farm — what’s the best way to understand the full picture? Should we just look at pollutant emissions? Or should we take a broad view, and consider the total lifecycle, including mining, manufacturing, transport and waste? The latter is what lifecycle assessment (LCA) is all about, and although it can be used to compare very complex sets of things in a helpful way, it can also be abused to suit an agenda.

To really be sure we’re comparing apples with apples, we need to understand the right ways and the wrong ways to do LCA. And then we need to think carefully about the implications of our research, and how to communicate them to a lay audience in such a way that they can inform policy without being misunderstood or misrepresented. It’s a tricky art, but our guest in this episode is an LCA veteran from NREL who can show us the way.

Geek rating: 6

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