Can corn ethanol really help decarbonize US air travel?
Can corn ethanol really help decarbonize US air travel?
The Biden administration will allow ethanol producers to access tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel. Farmers and climate groups have mixed reactions.
US air travel can be decarbonized by replacing it with electrified passenger rail. Trains with a pantograph don't need to store energy. Nearly all of the challenges of electrifying transportation are already solved and just require the infrastructure to be built.
Air travel should only be used for routes that cannot be serviced by electrified rail.
Corn monoculture is at the heart of so many environmental problems, I very much doubt this is a sustainable route forward.
No. It can help in transition by lowering carbon emissions and reliance upon fossil fuels, but a product of burning ethanol is still CO2.
Bluntly: no.
Burning fuel puts CO2 into the atmosphere. Yes, you might be at close to net zero if it's a biofuel (e.g., the carbon in the atmosphere goes into the corn, when then goes into the airplane and back into the atmosphere), but we need to be at negative carbon, not net zero.
Ah, I think there’s a spelling mistake in the title - let me see if I can fix it for you:
Please give more money to the corn lobby
Remember, every time you use cropland for not-food, you're worsening food security.
It's not enough that you feeding food to food, and feeding food to cars, now it's about feeding food to airplanes.
But corn subsidies must flow
BTW, can rapeseed oil be used for aviation fuel?
Probably, but soy is the one that's being most converted into hydrocarbons in the US
Yeah, my thought was because of rapeseed oil being used for cars in some parts of the USSR in 70s and 80s.