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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Not really. Biofuels are better than normal oil-derived fuels in terms of excess CO2 being dispersed in the environment, but they are still overall bad. They still release harmful particulates, they still release lots of NOx, and they are doubly bad in terms of land utilization, where you use huge swaths of land to cultivate plants with the sole goal of making them into fuel, rather than using that land to make food. Moreover, in a lot of places the cultivation of biofuel plants is being done by burning down forests and using that land for farming.
Biofuels are definitely better than normal petrol or diesel, but they are still overall bad, and I'd also argue that if we 100% switched to biofuels we'd have massive issues in terms of land, farming-related emissions, deforesting etc.
Depending on where biofuels are produced, the land use changes can make them worse for climate than fossil fuels. E.g. there was a recent study on US biofuels.
Frankly, those are just local problems and thus negligible (compared to greenhouse gas emissions).
So don't be stupid about it: make as much of them as you can out of waste fats and oils, then stop. Easy-peasy!
This isn't wrong, but it's a massive strawman argument because doing that would be idiotic anyway. Biofuels are best used for filling the gaps left over after cities are fixed for bikeability and everything reasonable to electrify is electrified. (In other words, they're the answer to "but what about my [insert special-snowflake reason why I can't ride a damn bike/train/electric car]?" pearl-clutching.)
There is no one solution to sustainability, and pretending there is is a fallacy.
Tell that to those dying because of those toxic emissions.
Sure, I agree, but if you want biofuels to be a significant enough part of the fuel mix, you need to make them at scale, which means you need incentives and by incentives I mean making them profitable enough so that it makes sense to invest billions into making them. At that point it becomes a race towards who can make the most at the lowest price to make the most money, and guess where that brings you. Otherwise, if you limit fuel crops, you'll get a very small production at a high price, since the scalability and possibility for growth will be limited.
This is really what I'd like to see, using the massive taxes on fuels to finance sustainable mobility like trams, rail, bikes etc
Biofuels are great and all to fill that gap, but the moment they become more profitable or cheaper than fossil fuels, it's the moment you're gonna have massive problems.