this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Bit of a cart/horse issue sadly. If the farm machines were burning more ethanol than fossil fuels (or were electric) then this mightn't be the case. :-/ Of course there are other issues with ethanol production too (like erosion from unsustainably growing corn, replacing food crops with fuel crops, etc.)
If we put all of the other environmental factors aside and we didn't use fossil fuels to produce and transport ethanol, then ethanol would be better than fossil fuels in that the net carbon in the atmosphere wouldn't change. That's the goal with ethanol.
Ethanol agriculture is really inefficient land use. There isn't enough land on the planet to grow enough crops to supply ethanol for the entire world to use. And spoiler alert: ethanol actually emits more CO2 than fossil fuels when you include production, refinement, and blending. Okay, if everything was running on ethanol, sure, we'd cut CO2 emissions by roughly half, but then we're back to that pesky land issue.
As for EV's, batteries take enormous amounts of energy from the mining and manufacturing. At best, comparing lifetime emissions (resource mining, manufacturing, use, and scrapping), it's basically a wash with a typical ICE vehicle. Add to that the fact that they're about 30% heavier than their ICE equivalents (because batteries are so damn heavy), it means they'll wear down roads faster (causing more emissions to extract resources, construct and maintain roads) and wear tires faster. Oh, and fun fact: tires are actually the biggest polluter in any road vehicle.
Another effortpost brought to you by /c/collapse
The article you linked about ethanol specifically says there is more to the story as the authors cherry picked data and made worst case assumptions.
The evidence is very strong that even when EVs are produced and run using fossil fuels, their lifetime emissions are still less than and ICE vehicle.
The car tires being a large polluter is complicated. However the potential is there that for man vehicles the total fine particulate produced by tires wear is greater than the total fine particulate from exhaust. However the question is, what environmental impact does that have?
Microplastics. Microplastics everywhere. And it will be worse with EV's because they weigh 30% more on average than their ICE counterparts (heavy as fuck batteries)
Ideally, you'd use agricultural by-products for ethanol/biofuel production.
Granted, we're not there yet, but it would be a more worthy goal.