[ Episode #91 // Age of Stagnation? ]

[00:04:46] Chris Nelder: Welcome back Mike to the Energy Transition Show.

[00:04:49] Mike Grunwald: Thanks so much for having me. It's been a while.

[00:04:51] Chris Nelder: Yeah, in fact, it's been 10 years, basically, just a few months shy of that. So I'm particularly happy to have you back on the show. And I suppose it's a positive sign of how much progress the energy transition has made because you were our very first guest and the subject of that episode, Episode #1, was the war on coal, which was then very much underway in the US now, not only is no one even talking about the war and coal anymore, coal feels like it's very much in the rear view mirror, at least in the US. Coal's share of electricity generation in the US has halved since then, falling from a third of generation in 2015 to just 15% 2024. In fact, I can't even remember the last time we did a coal death watch segment on the show. So coal has been fading into the past in the developed world for years. Now it's even beginning to show signs of peaking in the rest of the world, as we've mentioned numerous times on this show. So that's really something to celebrate. We've actually made quite a lot of progress since you joined us on Episode #1, 10 years ago.

[00:05:49] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, it's amazing. It's funny. You know, back at the time, I was writing a lot about energy and climate. And then I guess what six years ago, I decided that you energy folks, our fellow energy nerds, you had it under control. And I could go right about food and climate and so I assume you guys have fixed all the energy stuff, right? That's all done.

[00:06:07] Chris Nelder: Yeah, we're all set. It's all good. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:10] Mike Grunwald: Let's do food!

[00:06:11] Chris Nelder: I'm gonna convert everything over to a politics blog now. All right, well look, so before we dive into talking about your new book, maybe you could just give us a little bit of background. Like how did you make that transition from being an energy journalist focused on coal to spending six years thinking about food?

[00:06:28] Mike Grunwald: Right. I mean, the book is called, We Are Eating the Earth, and so it's essentially about how agriculture is eating the earth. And the short answer is I stumbled into it through biofuels, which we're going to talk about. It turns out that biofules cover about a Texas worth of the earth, while for example, livestock cover 50 Texas's worth of earth. But that's the short answer. Well, I'll tell you the story of how I literally stumbled into. I had written Again, this was when I was at Politico magazine, and I wasn't a full-time energy reporter, but I wrote a magazine story about my new life in the green economy, because I had gotten solar panels for my roof, and I'd gotten an all-electric Chevy Bolt. So I wrote this piece.

[00:07:13] Chris Nelder: I remember that piece, yeah.

[00:07:15] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, I mean, the idea was, and I don't want to say that I'm some kind of visionary or anything, but I was not some ecosaint or, you know, I wasn't obsessed with being green all the time. I did it because I knew enough about the energy world that this would pencil out and I was kind of an ecomercenary that I was going to save money. It was like an eight year payback. So I wrote this piece and in it, I mentioned that I'm not some kind of crazy green guy. I don't unplug my computer at night. I don't line dry my laundry. I still eat meat. And I went back and I was just doing the fact check and I realized, huh, is eating meat even bad for the climate? Like I genuinely didn't know. And I had been writing about energy and climate for probably at that point, 10-15 years. I called Tim Searchinger, who I had known for a couple of decades back when he was just a wetlands lawyer. I called him and I said, Hey, I know you're thinking a lot about agriculture and climate. Stupid question. Is meat really that bad for the climate? And he said, yes. And duh. And what he explained to me is we had worked on corn ethanol stuff together and as we'll discuss, the problem with corn ethanol is that it uses too much land. And the problem with meat was it uses 50 times as much land and that means it's tearing down wetlands and forests that are storing carbon and putting all that carbon back into the atmosphere. I realized at that point that if I'm actually kind of covering climate and I don't know that meat is bad and that food is about one third of our climate problem and I don't know anything about it. Figured, you know, there are a lot of books about energy and climate, but probably I should learn something about the food side.

[00:09:12] Chris Nelder: As we all should, no doubt.

[00:09:14] Mike Grunwald: I encourage your fellow energy dorks to pick it up.

[00:09:19] Chris Nelder: Okay, well let's talk about food then. Let's talk your new book. Now that book launched a day before this episode on July 1st, and it's titled, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. And it's a comprehensive study of all the ways that humans have tried over the past several decades in particular to keep producing more food and keep boosting the yield of farmland and the role that agriculture plays in the climate system. And I really encourage those who are interested in the subject to pick up a copy and check it out because... It seems to pretty well cover all the major questions and techniques in use today, at least the ones that I was aware of, but I really strive to stay in our lane on this show and restrict the conversation to the energy transition. So today I really just want to focus in on the first part of the book, which tells the story of this long campaign waged by your friend, Tim Searchinger to stop the madness that is using crops to produce biofuels, both to produce liquid fuels like ethanol and biodiesel and to burn wood in power plants. So taking that from the top here, what was Tim's key insight about ethanol?

[00:10:26] Mike Grunwald: Well, again, the short answer is that it's eating the Earth, that it uses land. At that time, the basic calculus that climate analysts use about biofuels like ethanol was you added up all the emissions from growing the corn and then brewing the corn into ethanol and then distributing it to gas stations, and then you subtracted the carbon that was absorbed by growing the corn because that through photosynthesis, it took carbon dioxide out of the air. And then you also got the savings from replacing fossil fuels. And so that's kind of how you looked at it. And basically they had found that making ethanol was an unbelievably inefficient process, you know, way worse than making gasoline because you had that corn growing and taking some carbon out of the atmosphere. Ethanol was probably about 20% better than gasoline. But Tim looked at that and he wasn't a scientist, he wasn't an economist. But he just said, wait a minute, that corn is already growing when it was growing food. It's already taking carbon out of the atmosphere. What are the benefits here? And then he realized like according to this calculation that basically you could just take the 90 million acres of corn that we were using to grow food in this country and just immediately convert it to fuel. And it would have no effect on nature around the world. Nobody would tear down any trees to grow more food. And that just made no sense to him. And of course, that was crazy. It treated land as if it was free. And that's what at that point, just about all climate analyses did. When you actually recognize that there's an opportunity cost to using land to grow fuel instead of food, then suddenly the calculus is transformed. And Tim ended up writing, even though he wasn't a scientist, he wrote the first piece in science that pointed out that because of this phenomenon of indirect land use change, that if you grow fuel, then you're gonna have to grow more food somewhere else and that's gonna require more land that actually ethanol was about twice as bad for the climate as gasoline.

[00:12:39] Chris Nelder: So this was a fairly heretical idea in the early aughts because back then biofuels were widely considered to be part of the energy transition portfolio of solutions. And ethanol was by far the dominant biofuel being produced in the US at the time.

[00:12:56] Mike Grunwald: I mean, it was not only that it was pretty much the only green energy solution that was being pursued at the time. This was really before solar and wind had any kind of traction and biofuels, people were talking about it, that this was going to be the next green thing. This was going to wean us off fossil fuels. Remember this was around the time that general motors had killed their electric car, there was a documentary who killed the electric car. But biofuels was going to be this incredible solution. They were renewable and just the word bio, it makes it sound sort of good as opposed to fossil fuels, which sound like zombies coming back from the dead to destroy the planet. So yeah, there was all this excitement. There was starting to be a lot of investment and Vinod Khosla was sort of the leader of the sort of green energy investors who is investing in a bunch of cellulosic ethanol companies. The idea was that these alternative fuels were going to be the replacement for fossil fuels. And not only was that going to be a nice climate thing at a time when people weren't really thinking about the climate very much, but the idea is that it was gonna be energy independence, we weren't gonna have to rely on all that horrible foreign oil from the Middle East. And it was, to the extent that we used corn ethanol or soy biodiesel, it was going to really nice for American farmers. And of course, Congress loves things that are nice for American farmers.

[00:14:25] Chris Nelder: Right. So this was again in the early aughts. So there was this University of California, Berkeley team that had published a study in 2006, finding that ethanol's emissions were 20% lower than gasoline. Then Tim Searchinger published his study in science in 2008, debunking that. And that of course, was all in the wake of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was this huge sort of omnibus energy bill pushed through under the George W. Bush administration in 2005. And it was an interesting time for Searchinger to publish his paper in February of 2008, because that was right when oil was going on its historic run to the stars and peak oil, which was a subject I was very much concerned with at the time was in the news and everybody was worried about oil supply and oil was making just this historic run from. Sort of a long-term average around $35 a barrel up to $147 in June of 2008. So his study came out just a few months before that, which was a very inconvenient time to be debunking green liquid fuel alternatives to oil.

[00:15:40] Mike Grunwald: Well, you know, it's pretty much always an inconvenient time to be writing or doing science about the flaws with biofuels, because they're just, they're seen as a source of income for farmers who have just unbelievable power in the United States Congress. At one point when Tim was trying to make the rounds of congressional offices, trying to lobby a little bit to get somebody at least to take a stand against corn ethanol. He was talking to an aide to Senator John Corzine of New Jersey, and he figured, hey, this guy, he's a liberal Democrat, so he cares about the environment. He's got no corn farmers in his state. Surely this is somebody who his constituents drive and they're going to end up paying more at the pump if they keep expanding these mandates. And so he's making the case and the Corzines aide said, look, you're making a lot of sense, Tim, but I'm sorry, my boss just has to worry about those corn farmers in Iowa. And it's like, wait a minute, Corzine was the head of Goldman Sachs. Does he actually think that he's gonna be president someday? And the aide looks at him and he says, Tim, they all think they're gonna be President someday. And of course, ethanol was considered the third rail of American politics in Iowa and you had to go through Iowa if you wanted to be president. So just messing with farmers was generally considered bad juju in Washington.

[00:17:09] Chris Nelder: Sure, and as you point out in the book, this wasn't just a US phenomenon. I mean, the IPCC, sort of the gold standard on global warming research, was promoting biofuels as a low carbon alternative to fossil fuels at the time as well.

[00:17:21] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, I tell some kind of harrowing stories about twice where the IPCC was working on reports, once it was about renewables. And the guy who was in charge of it, a guy named Bill Moomaw, he was a Tufts environmental scientist. He told the people who were working on the bioenergy chapter, hey, you got to look at this stuff Tim Searchinger has done. It's very important. And it shows that it's problematic to just think of biofuels as inherently good for the climate. And he recounted was that all the guys in charge of the biofuels chapter for the IPCC were biofueles guys. It was like their career. They were all consulting to various international institutions and pushing biofules. It wouldn't be very good for them after spending their lives researching the climate benefits of alternative fuels for them to endorse the IPCC saying that these things are, oh, nevermind. It's actually not good for the climate at all. So he said that basically they flat out refused. And then in 2014, there was another IPCC report. And this time they put a guy who had no skin in the game in charge of the bioenergy chapter. And he had even a couple of bioenergy critics on his panel. But again, there were so many bioenergy advocates who were scientists, but had really devoted their careers to it that they couldn't come to any agreement. And finally, the higher-ups just said, keep endorsing biofuels. It's one of the only solutions we have, and let's not get too deep into whether it's actually a good solution. So this scientist and two of the critics had to go publish basically the critical biofuel science warning about why these could actually be a climate disaster in this obscure scientific journal because they couldn't get it into their own IPCC paper.

[00:19:15] Chris Nelder: So, Searchinger's main contribution here to the scientific literature, especially with respect to ethanol, was this concept of indirect land use change or ILUC pronounced I-luck. And the concept again was just that converting land from one purpose to another tends to require more land to do whatever the original purpose was. So encouraging farmers to use existing crop land to grow ethanol instead of food would cause other farmers to take more land elsewhere on the planet to grow the food.

[00:19:43] Mike Grunwald: That's right. There are sort of two problems with biofuels, particularly when you're using crops. Like one is you create this competition between food and fuel and so you drive up the price of food and you create food shortages, food insecurity, food inflation. In 2008, it was creating food crises around the world and food riots. They had tortilla riots in Mexico and people were stampeding for vegetable oil in China. It was a real disaster. But then, as you said, the other problem is that as the price of these grains goes up or vegetable oil, it becomes much more profitable to farm them. And that leads to farmers tearing down more forests and draining more wetlands so they can grow more. And that has a huge climate impact. Now, after Searchinger's study pointed out these problems, what a lot of the subsequent studies did to try to minimize ILUC was just say like, Oh no, it's okay. Farmers aren't going to tear down any more forest, just basically people are going to stop eating so much because food's going to get expensive. And so they're going to stop eating meat. And that was sort of like the climate benefits of ethanol is basically that it's going to starve the developing world, but it actually wasn't true. What you really see is that when you do have these price spikes, it's not instant, but essentially when the price of grain goes up, the forest starts to come down and that has a massive impact on the carbon emissions from land use change. So when Tim started thinking about this ILUC concept, he did a literature review and he found that there was only one study that had even contemplated the idea of indirect land use changed. And it was actually the first study he had read about corn ethanol. It was very widely cited study that had found that corn ethanol was in fact a modest improvement over gasoline. It was from the Argonne National Laboratory by a scientist named Michael Wang and his friend Mark Delucci who was a scientist at UC Davis who had actually been worried about the land use impacts of ethanol for years. He had said, hey, you got to look at this. There's this possibility that if we grow more fuel, we're gonna end up having to grow more food elsewhere and that's gonna create all this land use change. So Wang went and he's like, fine, okay. And he looked at it, but using his assumptions, which were essentially that there would be very little land use changed, he found it incredibly minimal effect on the carbon calculus.

[00:22:19] Chris Nelder: And he was using the GREET model, as I recall.

[00:22:23] Mike Grunwald: That's right. And it's funny because the GREET model is still used and it's still really good for things like figuring out how many emissions you're creating through using fertilizer or how many emissions you are creating from trucking the ethanol to gas stations around the country. It does a very good energy balance. What it's really bad at is land use change because it had, as I describe in the book, it had a bunch of kind of preposterous assumptions that essentially all conspired to reach the same sort of reverse Murphy's law answer, which were, you know, no, nothing to see here. You can use as much land for fuel as you want, and nobody's going to need any more farmland for food.

[00:23:10] Chris Nelder: So how did the authors of the Science paper respond to Tim's critique?

[00:23:17] Mike Grunwald: You know, they were great. It's really hard to admit that you're wrong. I think not only for a scientist, but for anyone. And in fairness, in their original paper, they had at least acknowledged that biofuels could conceivably induce damaging land use changes. They had actually even mentioned the possible conversion of rainforest into plantations for fuel production, which it turns out is exactly what ended up happening in Indonesia, where they tore down the rainforest to grow oil palm. But what they had done in the original paper was kind of punted. They just said, look, the magnitude of such effects would be very difficult to estimate. It's really hard to figure it out. So we're just gonna essentially ignore it. We're gonna ignore land use change. But they did at least have that little caveat, which I talked to one of the co-authors, Michael O'Hare. And he says that even though all six of the authors ultimately realized that they were wrong and they regretted what they wrote about ethanol. They were all really relieved that they had put in that caveat that land use was a potential danger and kind of covered their asses with that. He told me that that he was sure he had put that into the study himself and he was equally sure that his five co-authors would make the same claim.

[00:24:33] Chris Nelder: That's good, although the damage was kind of done, right? Because that science paper was cited thousands of times. And I think a lot of people came away with the understanding that ethanol was better than gasoline from an emission standpoint. And it's sort of an example of Brandolini's law, isn't it?

[00:24:52] Mike Grunwald: That's right. The bullshit asymmetry principle. It's this notion that it takes in order of magnitude more work to debunk bullshit than it does to create bullshit. And in fairness, the Berkeley scientists felt really bad when Tim first approached them with this idea that they had messed up this paper that was the most cited in the field. They said to me as they were like, who is this asshole? He's not even a scientist. And then they looked at his work and to their credit, they were Like, hey! This random asshole is right. And they at least supported Tim when he was trying to convert his insights into policy change, which is not true of everybody else who had joined the biofueled bandwagon.

[00:25:36] Chris Nelder: Yes, well, speaking of random assholes debunking the authoritative findings of scientists, I could relate... And I had to laugh when I read the abstract of that paper. And in fact, I'm just going to read it out right now and see what we can learn from the benefit of hindsight. Quote, to study the potential effects of increased biofuel use, we evaluated six representative analyzes of fuel ethanol. Studies that reported negative net energy and correctly ignored co-products and use some obsolete data. All studies indicated that current corn ethanol technologies are much less petroleum intensive than gasoline. But have greenhouse gas emissions similar to those of gasoline. However, many important environmental effects of biofuel production are poorly understood. New metrics that measure specific resource inputs are developed, but further research into environmental metrics is needed. Nonetheless, it is already clear that large-scale use of ethanol for fuel will almost certainly require cellulosic technology. I laugh because I remember well the raging debates that were happening in the energy community at the time, specifically about the negative net energy of ethanol production. Back then, there was this vibrant online discussion at a website called The Oil Drum about that, of which I was a part, and it amuses me now to realize a couple of things sort of in retrospect. The first one is that at the same time the energy community was pointing out the low or even negative net energy yield of corn ethanol and trying to understand the energy yield of cellulosic ethanol, which was difficult because it wasn't really commercial yet and so nobody had any decent data, there was this parallel conversation in the agricultural policy community, including Searchinger and the Berkeley researchers who actually had a very different set of problems with corn ethanol and were rightly suspicious about the land use impacts of cellulose ethanol, which would require much more land than corn, but it seemed those two communities weren't even aware of each other. They certainly didn't seem to be talking to each other. The second insight I had was that the methodological problems in the life cycle assessment otherwise known as LCA of ethanol were real problems. But they were eventually worked out. In Episode #7 and #184 our friend David Murphy from St. Lawrence University explained how the evolving study of energy return on investment or EROI and net energy works. And Garvin Heath of NREL explained life cycle assessment to us back in Episode #59. And with the benefit of far better data and much improved methodology, Dave explained in Episode #184 that no liquid fuel products from conventional oil have an EROI above 10, meaning that whether you're producing gasoline or diesel or anything else from conventional crude today, in the end, you're never gonna get more than 10 times as much energy out of it as you put into making it. And that the average estimate for the EROI of oil today is around 4.2. While bioethanol, biodiesel and petrol from oil sands all have harmonized values below 5, as compared to the early days of oil extraction when the EROI of crude was over 100. So the underlying question that occupied the folks at the Oil Drum back then was what sorts of substitutes allow us to maintain a functioning society as the world past peak oil and commence the long downslope of global oil production. And even now, I think those researchers would consider ethanol to be a very poor, last resort kind of fuel. Definitely not a good substitute for oil and not something that you wanted to have to run a modern world on. And the final insight was that the Berkeley authors understood even then that producing ethanol would have some important and detrimental environmental effects. But they knew that they didn't know enough about them to quantify them. And so they called for further study. So even then in 2006, and actually the paper probably would have been written in 2005, It was clear that ethanol was anything but a reliable drop-in substitute for oil products, whether you were looking at it from the perspective of land impact as Searchinger and the Berkeley researchers were, or from the prospective of energy yield, as those of us in the energy community were, but that didn't stop the farm lobby from successfully pitching corn ethanol to the political class and getting many billions of dollars shoveled at them by Congress in the wake of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was signed into law by George W. Bush.

[00:30:01] Mike Grunwald: Well, no, it didn't look. I mean, I think the first thing I would say is that then we already discussed a little bit that the politics suck. There's a scene about this in the West Wing where the fictional presidential candidate is, is about to make a speech about how dumb and wasteful ethanol policy is and his political aid tells him you can make that speech, but then you won't get a single vote in Iowa. I think that's been looming over all of biofuels policy and look, even on non-biofuels issues. It's really hard to fight the farm bureau and the various ag interests all stick together. You'd think that, for instance, the pork lobby you'd think would be opposed to putting a lot of money into ethanol because it raises the price of the corn that they feed their pigs. And Tim, in fact, had that same insight and he'd had a secret meeting with the pork lobby to try to get them to lobby against these ethanol mandates. And basically they screwed him, they dimed him out to his bosses. His bosses didn't want to fight ethanol because it was too politically sticky. And basically, they realized that even though they might have slightly divergent economic interests from the corn industry on ethanol policy, that in general, the farm lobby wins when the farm lobby sticks together. And I think that's still true today. In fact, the Republican budget bill includes some language for sustainable aviation fuels. That its 2008 all over again. Not only are they expanding the subsidies and tax credits for biofuels, to put it this time in planes because they're afraid that electric vehicles are reducing the demand to put them in cars, but there's actual language in there that would prohibit the life cycle analyzes to take indirect land use change into account. They're basically putting their thumb on the scale like they always do.

[00:31:54] Chris Nelder: Yeah, we're going to talk about sustainable aviation fuels in a little bit. I wrote an article on the low EROI of ethanol back in 2012, which I'll link to in the show notes, where I made this conclusion, quote, corn ethanol offers a fine example of the problem. More than $20 billion in subsidies over the past three decades have ultimately turned nearly 40% of the U.S. Corn crop into less than 10% of country's fuel needs by volume and less than 7% by energy content. In 2009, the US taxpayer subsidized 75% of the price of each gallon of gasoline replaced with ethanol. It has proven to be an expensive way to make a low quality fuel, ethanol has about two thirds the energy content of gasoline, which reaches its scaling limit at a fairly low level," end quote. So I think Searchinger and I would have been on the same page with respect to using 40% of the corn crop to make biofuel, even if he wasn't also looking at the energy side of the equation.

[00:32:51] Mike Grunwald: Right. He might've been a little more upset that it was tearing down the Amazon. But I think it's also worth pointing out that one reason he stumbled into this was when he first looked at these studies, which did not have the kind of sophisticated analysis of the energy returns that you did, but he could look at it and say like, wow, this is incredibly inefficient from an energy standpoint. So where's the benefit? And at the time the benefit was supposedly, well, you grow corn, so you suck carbon out of the atmosphere. And his thing was like, but we're already growing corn. And so, yes, I think the science came out whichever way you looked at the issue. The science pointed the same direction.

[00:33:30] Chris Nelder: Okay, so the significance of all these wonky analyzes, of course, is that using land to grow corn and then turn that into ethanol is an extremely poor use of land, let alone the low energy yield you get from it. A 2019 report for the World Resources Institute led by Searchinger found, quote, on 73% of the world's land, the usable energy output of solar PV would exceed that of bioenergy by more than 100 to 1. Planting solar on your land, if you will, gives you 100 times more energy than using it to grow corn for fuel. And yet, 40% of the US corn crop is still used to produce ethanol.

[00:34:09] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, it's not great. What Tim likes to say is that that photosynthesis was invented a few billion years ago by blue green algae and they weren't all that smart. Look, the photosynthesis has done a really amazing job of maintaining life on earth for the last three billion years, but it's not great at producing energy. Land does an awesome job of storing carbon. It is pretty much the only way we have to grow food, but we have better ways of producing energy. At the time, electric vehicles didn't really seem like an awesome substitute. It looked like we were going to have to use gasoline, which was still better. But today where we actually have electric vehicles, which themselves depending on how you do the math are probably three times more efficient than internal combustion engines in terms of the conversion of solar energy. So really it's 300 times more efficient than using ethanol. Tim found that corn plants convert less than 0.2 percent of sunlight into usable energy. While solar panels at the time were about 20% efficient, now they're even more, but that means it can take 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol to generate the energy of a one acre solar array. So humanity would have to use 30% of its cropland to produce 2% of it's energy. It just doesn't work.

[00:35:28] Chris Nelder: And you were referencing a minute ago, the math as relates to EVs. We actually did do an episode on that. Our friend, Mark Lewis, joined us in Episode #110 to talk about how the transition to electric vehicles produces an obvious energy gain over using ethanol or gasoline. So those who are interested in that math can get a very deep discussion of that Episode #110. Well, okay. So let's talk about why the political support for ethanol has persisted. Despite all the evidence that it's a loser of an energy transition solution. And I think the simplest answer is, as the old saw goes, because the road to the White House starts in Iowa, as you mentioned a moment ago. Or in the pithy observation of veteran energy analyst Robert Hirsch, making ethanol from corn is a process by which a certain amount of energy in the form of natural gas and diesel fuel is used to create an equivalent amount of energy in the from of ethanol, with the primary output being money from government subsidies. Not to mention soil erosion. But of course the farm lobby doesn't talk about subsidies, just like the oil industry doesn't about their subsidies, instead they all talk about energy independence.

[00:36:36] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, well, right. This was after the Iraq War. So the idea that we shouldn't be dependent on Middle East oil was in vogue. But really, farmers always have a lot of juice in Washington. There's this idea that when you help farmers, you're helping kind of the heartland of America. And this used to be an agrarian nation where 99% of Americans farmed. And now 99% Americans don't, but somehow the same political tropes still hold true. And what's interesting today is that even though politically there's a huge partisan tilt where the farm vote has become a Republican vote, but Democrats are just as slavish in their pandering to the ag industry. It's just seen as terrible politics to be on the wrong side of it. And every president, certainly in my lifetime, has pretty much toed that line.

[00:37:28] Chris Nelder: It's interesting, isn't it? Especially with the observation that less than 1% of the US population is even involved in farming anymore. It's almost sort of a political path dependency, isn't it?

[00:37:40] Mike Grunwald: Right. And look, I always try to point out that those 1% of farmers, we do owe them a debt. Like they're the reasons that we can be doctors and bankers and podcasters and writers. We depend on them and they do a really good job growing food, but they also make a mess doing it, you know, in the United States and in many other countries, it's sort of, you're not even allowed to, to kind of try to force them to clean up that mess. It's considered intrusive. So even while in one hand, they're shoveling in government subsidies. So on the one hand, they're getting enormous government subsidies for the privilege of being a farmer. On the other hand, they're almost inevitably complaining about government intrusion, government intervention, government regulation. It's certainly an odd conundrum.

[00:38:27] Chris Nelder: Yeah, government is good when it gives me money, it's bad when it makes me do things I don't want to do.

[00:38:31] Mike Grunwald: And they don't have to do that many things they don't want to do, that's for sure.

[00:38:36] Chris Nelder: I mean, even if the energy yield made sense, which obviously it does not, the sheer volume of the petroleum-based fuels we consume means that ethanol could never displace more than a small fraction of demand for liquid fuels in the US, even in those rah-rah days of optimism around ethanol 20 years ago, it was clear that even if wildly unrealistic assumptions for it were to be realized, ethanol would still never produce more than about a third of US demand for gasoline. Let alone diesel, middle distillates like kerosene and jet fuel and all the other products that add up to the world consuming over a hundred million barrels of oil per day, which is a good time to segue into the topic of renewable fuel standards, which I believe originated in the low carbon fuel standard first implemented in California. That required 10% of transportation fuels sold in the US to contain so-called renewable fuels, which effectively means we get around 10% nationally of corn ethanol. Blended into our gasoline. But those who advocated for those standards were reluctant to admit that it was a pretty bad idea politically, weren't they?

[00:39:40] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, well, look, farmers have power everywhere, you know, they're big in California, they are big in Europe, and in Europe and California, there was a lot of interest in climate action as well. And at that time, renewable fuels still sounded like climate action. There was a big fight going on behind the scenes in Europe over this stuff that I write about in the book. You had this guy, Paul Hodson, who is the top civil servant pushing biofuels at the European Commission's energy ministry. He was gung ho for a 10% biofuels mandate throughout Europe and Searchinger's work and ILUC was really complicating that. At the same time, there was a Green Party politician named Claude Turmes, who he actually managed to push through surprisingly tough conditions through parliament in September. So he shrunk the mandate to 5%. He limited it to biofueles that dramatically reduced emissions and even attached an ILUC provision that at the time looked strong enough to kill all crop-based biofuels.

[00:40:41] Chris Nelder: Yeah. In fact, we had Claude Turmes on the show way back in Episode #47 to talk about some of that work that he did in leading European climate policy.

[00:40:50] Mike Grunwald: In California, you had Dan Sperling, who ran a research center at UC Davis in California. And he was putting together the low carbon fuel standard. And he spoke to Searchinger and he was like, look, you're right. The ILUC looks like a huge problem. Corn ethanol probably doesn't make sense. But is it politically palatable to rule out biofuels on good farmland. So that is the big question.

[00:41:14] Chris Nelder: Ding, ding, ding.

[00:41:16] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, look, I mean, he was sort of the father of the low carbon fuel standard, and he was afraid it was going to get strangled in the cradle. And if you gave ILUC the value that the science showed it could have, there was no way to justify corn ethanol. It just wouldn't pencil out. And you had farm interests who were pushing ethanol and soy biodiesel. You also had these advanced biofuels investors like Khosla who are pushing for cellulosic ethanol. They were lobbying Governor Schwarzenegger to just ditch ILUC, don't even look at it. So what Sperling told Tim was that he had a compelling case on the merits, but not on the politics. I he actually told me, he said, we had to be realistic. Tim had astronomical numbers that would have ruled out crop-based biofuels. That would have been a political disaster. So again, it wasn't like there was some scientific argument that in fact, indirect land use change was not a thing. It was just a political argument that if we make it too big a thing, we're not going to be able to have low carbon fuels at all.

[00:42:18] Chris Nelder: Yeah, there's a lot of people objecting to or pushing back against the energy transition lately under this claim that it's not realistic. And that's a popular word again. And as you point out in the book, even the environmental defense fund, a major NGO thought that its priority was cap and trade, and they didn't want to jeopardize that credibility. They didn't wanna jeopardize their credibility as a consensus builder by speaking out against ethanol either.

[00:42:42] Mike Grunwald: Yeah, I mean, Tim had worked there for 17 years and he had never, they'd never interfered with his work, but they shut down his work on biofuels because they wanted to suck up to farmers to try to put together this grand coalition to pass cap and trade. In the end, of course, not only did they cave on the renewable fuel standard and on the ethanol issues, but the farmers ended up screwing them anyway on cap and trade. It never happened.

[00:43:08] Chris Nelder: Yeah, exactly. So even when the scientists and activists knew that crop-based biofuels weren't a great idea, they were reluctant to face the political pressure of saying so and beyond that, as you mentioned, biofueles had more problems beyond being crop- based. There was this huge push at the time, as we talked about for cellulosic ethanol, which was to be made from low grade non-crop inputs like switch grass, I will never forget the sound of George W. Bush saying switch grass. But they didn't pan out. And as you point out, Vinod Khosla told Congress that cellulosic ethanol could fulfill Bush's entire 35 billion gallon mandate within a decade and replace most US gasoline within two decades. But as you pointed out in the book, he was about 35 billion gallons short. Several Khosla backed cellulosics startups failed. And as your point out it had become sort of a stale joke that second generation biofuels were five years away and always would be.

[00:44:09] Mike Grunwald: Well, they still are, right? I mean, my point is that it's kind of incredibly lucky that they are, there were a lot of smart people working on cellulosic ethanol. And if they had figured out a way to at least make it even plausibly usable in a commercial setting with the massive subsidies that were already being thrown at it, that could have been a environmental disaster. Because remember, I mean it is true, crop based fuels are a huge problem in terms of land use change. But while cellulosic ethanol and other, you know, sort of switchgrass, other grasses, you, know, they're not specifically crops, you they're not taking corn or soybeans away from a child or a cow, but they are using farmland. They are using land. And If you're using land that could otherwise be producing crops... You have the same opportunity cost problems. And since the yields are lower, you could have even bigger opportunity cost problem. So yeah, I mean, cellulosic ethanol never did pan out. But if it had, there might not be an Amazon today.

[00:45:16] Chris Nelder: Well, indeed. And as you point out in the book, Brazil's deforestation rate doubled in a year under this push for ethanol and Searchinger compiled a long list of studies by institutions like the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization, that all concluded that biofuels played a major role in that deforestation. And as far as Khosla goes, although ChatGPT didn't give me a super helpful answer on this, it looks to me like Khosla's cellulosic ethanol strategies torched around $1 billion in investor capital between the various investors and the public. So yeehaw for cellulosic ethanol.

[00:45:50] Mike Grunwald: Remember KiOR? Range Fuels?

[00:45:55] Chris Nelder: I certainly do. I was watching their stock ticker every day.

[00:46:00] Mike Grunwald: It was tick tick tick, tick, boom, right?

[00:46:03] Chris Nelder: It was. And then, you know, there were all these potential feedstocks that were talked up in those heady days of the biofuel craze. There was jatropha, which is kind of a shrub that grows, I believe in India, various other oil seed crops that theoretically could be made into biodiesel. So there was kind of another branch of biofuels there with biodiesel as opposed to ethanol, but again, despite billions of dollars that were poured into these methods, none of them ever reached scale or even became potentially viable pathways to some sort of future biofueles, not even fuels made from algae, which was a strategy that got a lot of attention and investment from everyone from oil majors like BP and Exxon to the researchers at Masdar city in the UAE. I remember visiting Mazdar city and going to their lab and talking with the researchers who are trying to make algae biofuels work, and being very skeptical that it would ever become a scalable strategy, not because of the land use concerns, because after all, part of the whole pitch for algal biofuel was that they didn't require much land, they could be bred in tanks or whatever, but because of the low EROI, which was apparent even then.

[00:47:10] Mike Grunwald: I remember visiting China with Steve Chu when he was energy secretary, and he was all excited about some university lab where they were trying to turn algae into biofuel. And he was very excited about it. It was a crazy time. BP, this was when they were going beyond petroleum, and they had put $500 million into biofuels research. Half of it went to Berkeley where those guys were writing about how ethanol was better than gasoline. I talked to one guy who started a biofuel startup and he told me, he was at Berkeley at the time, and he said there was just so much fucking money, you had to follow the money. Jatropha is another great example where it fizzled too and all the land grabbers who cleared and degraded millions of acres in Africa, they quickly abandoned them. Really the only advanced biofuels that have gained any traction in the US or pretty anywhere else were diesel substitutes. That were made from recycled cooking oil in California. And they got extra subsidies because they didn't induce indirect land use change because they were using waste. And so that's actually a legitimate climate solution. It's just not a scalable one.

[00:48:21] Chris Nelder: Right, because they provided a truly minuscule contribution to California's demand for fuel, despite enjoying all the political support they could ever want. So, so much for liquid biofuels that could substitute for fuels derived from petroleum, but that's not the end of it because there's also the problem of biomass and especially the strategy of burning wood to fuel a power plant. Now, this is an extremely fraught topic, so much so that I have declined to even really talk about it on this show. Even though we're now over 250 episodes and a decade into producing it.