Seems like the barrier there is making the actual solar panels and not the raw amount of usable land, which the US effectively had an unlimited amount of?
The real hold up is permitting and transmission. Texas is able to build and deploy lots of solars. It is able to do much more than California (which subsidizes solar) because it has less regulatory bottlenecks.
Eventually you would hit material constraints but that problem is much further down the line of problems.
World annual PV panel production capacity is round 1.8TW, while annual installations are around 650GW. There's plenty of excess production capacity to build out that kind of transformation in a handful of years at most.
Fun fact - even if we did that and then did something dumb like use it all to capture carbon, make hydrogen, and turn those into synthetic gasoline? That's enough electricity to make enough gasoline to replace around 70% of American gasoline use. 10x more on an energy basis (since ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline) than corn ethanol manages, even if you completely ignore all the energy inputs into corn farming. Also, this would provide way more revenue for the landowners.
I realize this is not economically viable today because synthetic fuels are still too expensive, and that switching to EVs would be much better. But it illustrates how electricity at that scale opens up a *lot* of options.
Great column. I wonder if there is a template for overturning concentrated producer subsidies (ethanol mandate, Jones Act, Sugar Program). America’s multiple-veto-point status quo bias makes it hard of course. Presumably if we were ever able to kill one, the tactics used might help with the others. Maybe the repeal of the crude oil export ban or the '96 farm bill have lessons.
Rent seeking is and has forever been common in human governance. Which is not to say we shouldn't reduce and fight it. It's a truly pernicious tax on prosperity and well-being. But if one One Weird Trick existed to deal with rent-seeking, we'd probably have found it by now. More likely, it's a never-ending battle, and the occasional victories occur when the subsidized party in question loses political clout (often over an agonizingly long period of time), or when some emergency enables a sufficiently powerful coalition to gut it.
I do sometimes get the impression we may be nudging closer to that blessed day when the Jones Act is finally (FINALLY!) repealed. I have no idea about using corn to make fuel.
Sure, and I am very much agreeing there is not One Weird Trick and the scoundrels must be beaten back every day! But I am saying this regular patrolling is NOT happening and we need to change the emphasis in what our electeds and their officials are doing. THE job that people need from them is to cut this BS out.
This I think is the best argument for automatically sunsetting laws after a certain number of years. It’s much easier to keep a stupid protectionism than to create one from scratch.
Eh, I don't agree with that sunsetting idea. Bills are hard enough to pass as is, should we really include a trap door that's going to trigger more fighting? If the ACA sunsetted, the GOP could've just slow walked the implementation of the law and ran out the clock knowing there would never be enough of a D majority to pass it again.
Seems like the unpopular part was the individual mandate which was effectively removed in Trump’s first term and turns out the system survived without it—so Democrats should’ve just been able to pass a version with no individual mandate?
Yep. Not to mention all of the pre-Internet laws being applied to the Internet leading to things like single moms being sued for millions of dollars for file sharing based on per-work statutory copyright damages or the recent billion-dollar judgment against an ISP that was overturned by the Supreme Court. If we had to pass the Copyright Act over again there is no way Congress would agree to these kinds of damages calculations.
Matt, you and I are kismet on this subject. One I have been railing against for over a decade.
This is nothing more than transfer payments to Midwest farmers.
The amount of fertilizers that end up in the Mississippi creates a dead zone at the mouth of the river, which is said to be 1200 sq miles. It creates more carbon than it fixes. It ruins engines by creating water. It attracts water from condensation. As an environmental program, it gets an F.
Were it not for the Iowa Primary and others, this program would have been killed a long time ago. I like farmers just fine, but they can grow something else. We don’t need to put food in our gas tanks.
Another thing this biofuel mandate does from an environmental perspective is delay electrification, which is the #1 solution to reduce CO2 emissions. Germany is about to scrap what is basically a "heat pump or district heating" mandate in buildings and to allow the installation of oil and gas heating in new buildings again, provided the oil and gas get blended with biofuels. A solution that's more expensive for households AND worse for the environment than a heat pump, but nevertheless gets pushed incredibly hard politically.
I really think it’s strange how for a long period of time people in my life who never say a word about politics are frustrated by the price of food and no one says or does anything about it.
I’d like to know how much it would matter if we stopped doing ethanol stuff but it seems like this kind of thing should be a big deal.
I mean the price of coke has nearly doubled in six years. It may be mostly that but a lot of normal grocery items have had huge increases in cost. Yesterday people were talking up convenience foods as opposed to an insane door dash need claim. The price of frozen lunches has gone up a notable amount. Like the brands that have plant based options went from 4-7. The nominal costs of groceries really is a stress point for people and we’ve been taking steps to make it worse not better.
I have noticed a general $20 increase in the base weekly grocery bill. The prices going out to eat have gone up much more. I feel like I get more complaints about burritos and sandwiches now being 2x what they were precovid than groceries (barring beef cuts.)
I obviously strongly agree with Matt on the merits. Corn farmers were an easy add to the Rent Seekers Tournament I ran on here on a March in the past. It really is as dumb as Matt says.
However...this issue always causes Matt to temporarily ignore his other hobbyhorse of being obsessed with winning the Senate. By Cook PVI, the 60th Senate seats for Democrats is a tie between Alaska, Texas, and...Iowa. It's no longer a swing state, but it's stil very inportant for crossing the filibuster line. I appreciate that Matt expects Josh Turek to "fight like a rabid dog on behalf of American biofuels interests". And I'm guessing he'd be fine with quietly let Iowa Democrats do this. But is this an issue that is salient enough with the public to put near the top of the agenda, at the risk of alienating Iowans?
Again, I personally am all for it, along with uniting the filibuster, because it's a dumb and bad policy, and I'd be more than willing to roll any political dice on it. But I've always noticed this change when I see Matt tweet about it.
Globally speaking, if biofuels really want their day in the sun not only do they need to show that innovation can make them decarbonization-positive and produce-positive (as in food security), they also have to be forest-positive.
Otherwise the expansion of biofuels into trucking, shipping and flying will exacerbate ecological and environmental harms as the economic pressure to convert forests into fuel steeply rises.
This isn’t just about an aesthetic preference for the planet — it’s also about maintaining natural pollination, water and air quality and a healthy water cycle for humans.
I suspect ethanol pumps are disproportionately faulty as well.
Kind of a niche concern but I’ve lost a couple fuel pumps to a bad batch of E85, and my “fun” car manufacturer and the forums have all sorts of warnings about avoiding ethanol enriched gas.
Yes, it's sheer idiocy on all fronts (there is absolutely without doubt no actual carbon emissions benefits under any current and foreseeable production given the inputs side) - and for bribing farmer vote (which is not a trivial consideration), much better to do something less perverse.
Proper bribery to the corn growers, prehaps equivalent Gov buy of corn. Soybeans probably doesn't need, but throw them that bone too. Net basis one will be better off.
Trump moved to exacerbate the corn ethanol issue by altering the way refining credits are counted to make blended fuels more attractive (after initially looking at making ethanol less attractive, but the lobbyists met with him and they did a 180.)
I am complete for Democrats to cut the ethanol mandate. The constituency is small and they have move far away from supporting the Democratic Party. If they want continued subsidies, then they should work harder to make their elections and constituencies more competitive.
“Claude tells me that there's a reasonable case that this evaporative ozone issue is overblown and year-round E15 is probably fine. However, I am declining to look into this question in detail because the underlying policy of requiring gasoline to be blended with ethanol is incredibly stupid.”
This move usefully expands the amount of intellectual ground a person can cover. Embracing ai means thinking this way and I’m cool with it. Just don’t hand over the steering wheel.
I think the point is that this ground was not covered because it is overcome by a more fundamental issue. If he didn't have Claude to claim one way or the other, it could have been literally any ody offering the claim and the discussion would go the same direction.
I agree. I don’t trust AI on cord points but if I press on counterintuitive things and go back and forth with it i’ll be 80% confident in the answer without doing any hard intellectual with myself.
AI is a beautiful tool for generalists and I am a generalist trapped in a lawyer’s career.
Is the commodity price of corn the main contributor to rising grocery prices, or to grocery prices in general? My intuition is that decreasing the commodity price of corn would have a quite modest impact on the price of groceries. It seems like there are other better arguments for removing the biofuels mandate, but centering the argument on grocery prices is less than convincing. There are many problems in America and the price of corn is too high is just not one of them.
How did he not even cover the fact that ethanol has less energy per mass than gasoline. So we are literally all paying more money to have shittier gas that we need to fill more often... Just so corn farmers make money
Converting all the land used just for the corn for just ethanol to solar panels would produce 3 times the electricity used in the US today.
Seems like the barrier there is making the actual solar panels and not the raw amount of usable land, which the US effectively had an unlimited amount of?
The real hold up is permitting and transmission. Texas is able to build and deploy lots of solars. It is able to do much more than California (which subsidizes solar) because it has less regulatory bottlenecks.
Eventually you would hit material constraints but that problem is much further down the line of problems.
World annual PV panel production capacity is round 1.8TW, while annual installations are around 650GW. There's plenty of excess production capacity to build out that kind of transformation in a handful of years at most.
Fun fact - even if we did that and then did something dumb like use it all to capture carbon, make hydrogen, and turn those into synthetic gasoline? That's enough electricity to make enough gasoline to replace around 70% of American gasoline use. 10x more on an energy basis (since ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline) than corn ethanol manages, even if you completely ignore all the energy inputs into corn farming. Also, this would provide way more revenue for the landowners.
I realize this is not economically viable today because synthetic fuels are still too expensive, and that switching to EVs would be much better. But it illustrates how electricity at that scale opens up a *lot* of options.
So ridiculous. Ralph Wiggum needs to be held to account for tricking people into this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgkHr9F1vw] Maybe we can tell the leprechaun to tell him to burn down the corn fields.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X9ktfzJOa4]
Great column. I wonder if there is a template for overturning concentrated producer subsidies (ethanol mandate, Jones Act, Sugar Program). America’s multiple-veto-point status quo bias makes it hard of course. Presumably if we were ever able to kill one, the tactics used might help with the others. Maybe the repeal of the crude oil export ban or the '96 farm bill have lessons.
Rent seeking is and has forever been common in human governance. Which is not to say we shouldn't reduce and fight it. It's a truly pernicious tax on prosperity and well-being. But if one One Weird Trick existed to deal with rent-seeking, we'd probably have found it by now. More likely, it's a never-ending battle, and the occasional victories occur when the subsidized party in question loses political clout (often over an agonizingly long period of time), or when some emergency enables a sufficiently powerful coalition to gut it.
I do sometimes get the impression we may be nudging closer to that blessed day when the Jones Act is finally (FINALLY!) repealed. I have no idea about using corn to make fuel.
Sure, and I am very much agreeing there is not One Weird Trick and the scoundrels must be beaten back every day! But I am saying this regular patrolling is NOT happening and we need to change the emphasis in what our electeds and their officials are doing. THE job that people need from them is to cut this BS out.
This I think is the best argument for automatically sunsetting laws after a certain number of years. It’s much easier to keep a stupid protectionism than to create one from scratch.
Eh, I don't agree with that sunsetting idea. Bills are hard enough to pass as is, should we really include a trap door that's going to trigger more fighting? If the ACA sunsetted, the GOP could've just slow walked the implementation of the law and ran out the clock knowing there would never be enough of a D majority to pass it again.
Seems like the unpopular part was the individual mandate which was effectively removed in Trump’s first term and turns out the system survived without it—so Democrats should’ve just been able to pass a version with no individual mandate?
Yep. Not to mention all of the pre-Internet laws being applied to the Internet leading to things like single moms being sued for millions of dollars for file sharing based on per-work statutory copyright damages or the recent billion-dollar judgment against an ISP that was overturned by the Supreme Court. If we had to pass the Copyright Act over again there is no way Congress would agree to these kinds of damages calculations.
I mean SO MANY laws are corrupt rent-seeking BS. It's appalling, and people should be more angry about it.
The model might be the way military bases were closed, in large batches at once with an up or down vote.
Excellent parallel. Thanks for mentioning.
Just like how if Michigan wasn’t a swing state we’d have better auto industry policy, if Iowa wasn’t our first caucus we would have better ag policy.
Can't like this enough, inject that Iowa hate directly into my veins.
Matt, you and I are kismet on this subject. One I have been railing against for over a decade.
This is nothing more than transfer payments to Midwest farmers.
The amount of fertilizers that end up in the Mississippi creates a dead zone at the mouth of the river, which is said to be 1200 sq miles. It creates more carbon than it fixes. It ruins engines by creating water. It attracts water from condensation. As an environmental program, it gets an F.
Were it not for the Iowa Primary and others, this program would have been killed a long time ago. I like farmers just fine, but they can grow something else. We don’t need to put food in our gas tanks.
Another thing this biofuel mandate does from an environmental perspective is delay electrification, which is the #1 solution to reduce CO2 emissions. Germany is about to scrap what is basically a "heat pump or district heating" mandate in buildings and to allow the installation of oil and gas heating in new buildings again, provided the oil and gas get blended with biofuels. A solution that's more expensive for households AND worse for the environment than a heat pump, but nevertheless gets pushed incredibly hard politically.
I really think it’s strange how for a long period of time people in my life who never say a word about politics are frustrated by the price of food and no one says or does anything about it.
I’d like to know how much it would matter if we stopped doing ethanol stuff but it seems like this kind of thing should be a big deal.
The price of prepared food really spiked relative to ten years ago.
I mean the price of coke has nearly doubled in six years. It may be mostly that but a lot of normal grocery items have had huge increases in cost. Yesterday people were talking up convenience foods as opposed to an insane door dash need claim. The price of frozen lunches has gone up a notable amount. Like the brands that have plant based options went from 4-7. The nominal costs of groceries really is a stress point for people and we’ve been taking steps to make it worse not better.
I have noticed a general $20 increase in the base weekly grocery bill. The prices going out to eat have gone up much more. I feel like I get more complaints about burritos and sandwiches now being 2x what they were precovid than groceries (barring beef cuts.)
I obviously strongly agree with Matt on the merits. Corn farmers were an easy add to the Rent Seekers Tournament I ran on here on a March in the past. It really is as dumb as Matt says.
However...this issue always causes Matt to temporarily ignore his other hobbyhorse of being obsessed with winning the Senate. By Cook PVI, the 60th Senate seats for Democrats is a tie between Alaska, Texas, and...Iowa. It's no longer a swing state, but it's stil very inportant for crossing the filibuster line. I appreciate that Matt expects Josh Turek to "fight like a rabid dog on behalf of American biofuels interests". And I'm guessing he'd be fine with quietly let Iowa Democrats do this. But is this an issue that is salient enough with the public to put near the top of the agenda, at the risk of alienating Iowans?
Again, I personally am all for it, along with uniting the filibuster, because it's a dumb and bad policy, and I'd be more than willing to roll any political dice on it. But I've always noticed this change when I see Matt tweet about it.
Globally speaking, if biofuels really want their day in the sun not only do they need to show that innovation can make them decarbonization-positive and produce-positive (as in food security), they also have to be forest-positive.
Otherwise the expansion of biofuels into trucking, shipping and flying will exacerbate ecological and environmental harms as the economic pressure to convert forests into fuel steeply rises.
This isn’t just about an aesthetic preference for the planet — it’s also about maintaining natural pollination, water and air quality and a healthy water cycle for humans.
The more you read about how much political power is wielded by people in swing states the more clear it is we need to move to a parliamentary system
Even in a presidential system things would be better if there wasn't a Senate and Electoral College.
I suspect ethanol pumps are disproportionately faulty as well.
Kind of a niche concern but I’ve lost a couple fuel pumps to a bad batch of E85, and my “fun” car manufacturer and the forums have all sorts of warnings about avoiding ethanol enriched gas.
Yes, it's sheer idiocy on all fronts (there is absolutely without doubt no actual carbon emissions benefits under any current and foreseeable production given the inputs side) - and for bribing farmer vote (which is not a trivial consideration), much better to do something less perverse.
Proper bribery to the corn growers, prehaps equivalent Gov buy of corn. Soybeans probably doesn't need, but throw them that bone too. Net basis one will be better off.
Trump moved to exacerbate the corn ethanol issue by altering the way refining credits are counted to make blended fuels more attractive (after initially looking at making ethanol less attractive, but the lobbyists met with him and they did a 180.)
I am complete for Democrats to cut the ethanol mandate. The constituency is small and they have move far away from supporting the Democratic Party. If they want continued subsidies, then they should work harder to make their elections and constituencies more competitive.
The smyllogism:
“Claude tells me that there's a reasonable case that this evaporative ozone issue is overblown and year-round E15 is probably fine. However, I am declining to look into this question in detail because the underlying policy of requiring gasoline to be blended with ethanol is incredibly stupid.”
This move usefully expands the amount of intellectual ground a person can cover. Embracing ai means thinking this way and I’m cool with it. Just don’t hand over the steering wheel.
I think the point is that this ground was not covered because it is overcome by a more fundamental issue. If he didn't have Claude to claim one way or the other, it could have been literally any ody offering the claim and the discussion would go the same direction.
I agree. I don’t trust AI on cord points but if I press on counterintuitive things and go back and forth with it i’ll be 80% confident in the answer without doing any hard intellectual with myself.
AI is a beautiful tool for generalists and I am a generalist trapped in a lawyer’s career.
Is the commodity price of corn the main contributor to rising grocery prices, or to grocery prices in general? My intuition is that decreasing the commodity price of corn would have a quite modest impact on the price of groceries. It seems like there are other better arguments for removing the biofuels mandate, but centering the argument on grocery prices is less than convincing. There are many problems in America and the price of corn is too high is just not one of them.
It's high time to end all corny policy prescriptions.
How did he not even cover the fact that ethanol has less energy per mass than gasoline. So we are literally all paying more money to have shittier gas that we need to fill more often... Just so corn farmers make money