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Do coconuts grow particularly efficiently? Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate im

Do coconuts grow particularly efficiently? Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.

mdp2021 2mo ago
They already grow, they are already harvested, and this process uses discarded parts of the harvest. It is putting in use what we already had but had no use for. Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Biofuel-Infographic-1200x675.png https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi... Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.
- dylan604 2mo ago
  To what scale though? Doubtful it's going to be enough for a replacement. Just as GP stated, the corn grown for ethanol is nothing more than an additive and it is quite easy to find fuel without it. It's a boondoggle and not any where close to being a fossil fuel replacement
  - fc417fc802 2mo ago
    Isn't that simply a matter of cost? It's pretty difficult to complete with pulling an energy dense material out of the ground. If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable. That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.
    - bluGill 2mo ago
      Oil has its own infrastructure. That infrastructure is producing things for airplanes almost as a byproduct. Both of the oil we pump from the ground goes to cars. If cars switch from using oil, that's going to raise the cost for everything else to get the oil they need because they have to pay for the full refinery output. Or in this case if airplanes quit using kerosene for jet fuel that is going to slightly raise the price of refined oil for everyone because the refineries don't have that one small extra part of their income sheet to help pay for the fixed cost of having a refinery. The whole system needs to work together, of course. If only airplanes get off, the difference is merely insignificant. However, if cars and airplanes both get off using oil, suddenly the other uses of oil become unfeasible.
- brainwad 2mo ago
  I presume that the market for coconut oil is far smaller than for jet fuel, so this solution can't scale without wreaking havoc on the environment. These sort of clever uses for exisiting byproducts only work when the market for the main product is much bigger than for the byproduct (e.g. down is a byproduct of duck/goose meat, leather is a byproduct of beef).
  - ghostly_s 2mo ago
    The existing solution is actively wreaking havoc on the environment. I don't know the specifics of this crop but generally agricultural products absorb a substantial amount of carbon when growing, so releasing some of that carbon by later burning has the potential to be close to carbon-neutral. Whilst petroleum fuels are 100% carbon negative.
    - brainwad 2mo ago
      There's more to the environment than the greenhouse effect. Coconut plantations would compete with rainforest in much the same way palm oil ones do, since they have more or less identical growing climates. If you want to use biofuels, use a plant that grows in low-value areas like open fields. Something like corn or sugarcane.
      - xp84 2mo ago
        Corn ethanol is a scam and consumes as much energy to make as it “produces.” Let’s not do that either.
        bluGill 2mo ago
        Nobody who had looked at it believes that. Even the well known critics admit it is energy positive. The ratio isn't very good, but it is energy positive.
        xp84 2mo ago
        Maybe slightly. But it also wastes land that could be growing food, raising food prices.
- clickety_clack 2mo ago
  Apparently (I’m relying on facts from Claude here), aviation uses about 100 billion gallons of oil a year and coconuts yield about 250 gal/acre, so assuming you can approximately replace them 1:1, you would need to plant about 400 million acres under coconut plantation, an area the size of Mexico. Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).
  - mdp2021 2mo ago
    Yes, but nobody said that it would replace kerosene. Especially at this stage.
- willtemperley 2mo ago
  That infographic says it uses 16-20% more fuel per unit of thrust. That's a significant amount more weight for an aircraft to carry, but because carrying extra fuel also burns fuel, extra fuel use would compound exponentially. This would probably mean significantly more than 20% extra fuel would be required for long-haul flights.
  - Animats 2mo ago
    Ouch. There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense. This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though. Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle. Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-coconut-tree-oil-copra-biodiesel https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
    - xp84 2mo ago
      ^^^ this I cringe thinking about more biofuel ideas getting forced through. Sure, let’s all spend a ton of petroleum energy on fertilizing, farm equipment, and processing, and raise food prices by using all the land for producing ethanol-corn, and jet fuel coconuts, just to get a slightly worse petroleum replacement fuel.
      - fragmede 2mo ago
        There's always the air-gasoline route. That's right! With enough chemical engineering and materials science, we can extract jet fuel from air and water. You extract out CO2 from the air, and H2 from water. You turn the CO2 and hydrogen into carbon monoxide, and then Fischer-Tropsch chemistry and some other magic gets you hydrocarbons out the other end! The problem is the economics of that process can't compete with oil from the ground.
- belorn 2mo ago
  Are there really discarded parts? Usually when people talk about discarded parts, what they really mean is those not used in the first process. The article says "parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste", but just a quick glance seems to show that there are other products that uses those parts of the crop, like biodegradable packaging and animal feed. Turning it into fuel and burning it would compete with the other uses for those 30%.
zweifuss 2mo ago
Middle of the road, comparable to Sunflower oil. But they want to utilize waste products and a low energy conversion process.
- mjevans 2mo ago
  Is Jet Fuel really the best use of coconut oil? I'd imagine it's far better as a lubricant or ingredient in things more directly adjacent to human rather than mechanical use.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- fuzzfactor 2mo ago
  I think with waste products there is more of a last-mile (first-mile?) collection issue. Regardless we're definitely seeing some processed bio-oil waste coming in to the diesel lab for analysis in the recent year or two. Looks to me like someone who is prospering based on coconut plantations would be the beneficiary from tapping a new market from a jet fuel process, and it probably could be made into a cleaner fuel than the waste-based bio-fuel.
zdragnar 2mo ago
All subsidies are wealth transfers. That's the whole point- to incentivize something that wouldn't otherwise happen at a scale the government deems to be of benefit or necessary. Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification. The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on. I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive. The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
- giantg2 2mo ago
  A lot of food cost is due to food waste and convenience (refrigerated shipping, out of season crops, etc). There's already a lot food waste due to logistics and consumer preference.
mortoc 2mo ago
Are the people against bioengineered produce also be against us working towards super efficient coconuts or some other plant we designed to fill the same role?
qeternity 2mo ago
Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor? It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
- Spooky23 2mo ago
  That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth. Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.
- giantg2 2mo ago
  "It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)." Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work. Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
  - kube-system 2mo ago
    The economic landscape of farming is very bimodal. “Most farmers” (by headcount) are subsistence farmers who live in impoverished countries and don’t produce very much food because they are feeding themselves and their immediate community. The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
  - bluGill 2mo ago
    What do you mean by farmers? Of the rich farmers, yes, most do have a second job, but the farming does pay most of their income. It's not just a hobby. The second job is something that they can do in between the farm work. The other thing about farming is it's very much investment heavy. And so for a young farmer just getting started out, you're going to be working at farming and all of your income is going right back to paying things off. And so you're going to need a second job to put the food on the table for a few years. After 10 years, because of inflation, you would hope that your income has gone up while the payment you're making on existing land is kept the same, and so you don't have some left over, and so you can start only being a farmer. After, say, 30 years, most of your land is now paid off, and now you can take all that money that was going into paying off millions of farmlands, and you're making enough income that you could pay off of millions of dollars a loan, and you have no loans, and you are very well off. Of course after 30 years you're also getting close to retirement age and you're probably thinking well I'm gonna sell that farm off and now you have a lot of money that you can put into regular retirement acounts and enjoy a really nice retirement. But that means you're not a farmer and so the farmers themselves really have to live like the poor but they're on track to be very wealthy.
317070 2mo ago
> it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel. But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0] Coconuts could be a breakthrough! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel
- the_sleaze_ 2mo ago
  Saw a recent post about an electric plane - was pretty sweet let me dig it up. $5 worth of fuel! > https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-completes-first-flight-of-world-s-largest-electric-aircraft https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    These are strictly short-haul transports, aiming for about 200km (125 mi) electric range, 800 km (500 mi) in hybrid mode with reduced passenger/payload load. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace#ES-30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace#ES-30>
- sixtyj 2mo ago
  How many coconuts are on one tree and how many tons of coconuts would be needed to replace kerosene globally? I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible. BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well. Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less. I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation. Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…
  - pfdietz 2mo ago
    Vaclav Smil so wildly mispredicted the trajectory of renewables that his worldview should be taken with heavy skepticism.
giantg2 2mo ago
"It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities" I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.
europoorean 2mo ago
> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities. Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
- b112 2mo ago
  My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive. International markets and all that...
  - stevenwoo 2mo ago
    NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.
    - WarmWash 2mo ago
      Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. People constantly repeat this, but it's flat out wrong. The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.
      - Retric 2mo ago
        > cheaper than heather options Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern. Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc. Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
Gibbon1 2mo ago
Just through this out again, biofuels are dumb. Per acre a solar farm produces 30 times the energy per year as corn without most of the environmental concerns that growing corn has. You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss. Biofuels, dumb.
kylehotchkiss 2mo ago
Same rural communities raise pitchforks upon mention of any other demographic receiving wealth transfers.
Razengan 2mo ago
They literally grow on trees
KennyBlanken 2mo ago
> The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago A few years ago? Corn ethanol subsidies have been a thing for my entire life. It's a net-negative fuel. Costs more fuel to produce than it provides. It's literally just a way to waste water, farmland, huge quantities of diesel (burned by engines exempt from any sort of emissions), labor, etc. What changed is that ethanol has been forced by regulations into more and more use over time. That has driven up demand for corn, and one of the worse side effects is that a major food staple for Mexico has gone up dramatically in price. > effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, If you think that's bad, stop and think for a moment about what purpose the US military serves for rural America, both directly through personnel but also indirectly through all the incredibly wasteful equipment, service, and supply contracts. The US military's primary reason for existence is force projection, but its secondary is keeping rural American's uneployment from skyrocketing.

mdp2021 2mo ago

They already grow, they are already harvested, and this process uses discarded parts of the harvest. It is putting in use what we already had but had no use for. Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Biofuel-Infographic-1200x675.png https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi... Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.

dylan604 2mo ago
To what scale though? Doubtful it's going to be enough for a replacement. Just as GP stated, the corn grown for ethanol is nothing more than an additive and it is quite easy to find fuel without it. It's a boondoggle and not any where close to being a fossil fuel replacement
- fc417fc802 2mo ago
  Isn't that simply a matter of cost? It's pretty difficult to complete with pulling an energy dense material out of the ground. If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable. That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.
  - bluGill 2mo ago
    Oil has its own infrastructure. That infrastructure is producing things for airplanes almost as a byproduct. Both of the oil we pump from the ground goes to cars. If cars switch from using oil, that's going to raise the cost for everything else to get the oil they need because they have to pay for the full refinery output. Or in this case if airplanes quit using kerosene for jet fuel that is going to slightly raise the price of refined oil for everyone because the refineries don't have that one small extra part of their income sheet to help pay for the fixed cost of having a refinery. The whole system needs to work together, of course. If only airplanes get off, the difference is merely insignificant. However, if cars and airplanes both get off using oil, suddenly the other uses of oil become unfeasible.
brainwad 2mo ago
I presume that the market for coconut oil is far smaller than for jet fuel, so this solution can't scale without wreaking havoc on the environment. These sort of clever uses for exisiting byproducts only work when the market for the main product is much bigger than for the byproduct (e.g. down is a byproduct of duck/goose meat, leather is a byproduct of beef).
- ghostly_s 2mo ago
  The existing solution is actively wreaking havoc on the environment. I don't know the specifics of this crop but generally agricultural products absorb a substantial amount of carbon when growing, so releasing some of that carbon by later burning has the potential to be close to carbon-neutral. Whilst petroleum fuels are 100% carbon negative.
  - brainwad 2mo ago
    There's more to the environment than the greenhouse effect. Coconut plantations would compete with rainforest in much the same way palm oil ones do, since they have more or less identical growing climates. If you want to use biofuels, use a plant that grows in low-value areas like open fields. Something like corn or sugarcane.
    - xp84 2mo ago
      Corn ethanol is a scam and consumes as much energy to make as it “produces.” Let’s not do that either.
      - bluGill 2mo ago
        Nobody who had looked at it believes that. Even the well known critics admit it is energy positive. The ratio isn't very good, but it is energy positive.
        xp84 2mo ago
        Maybe slightly. But it also wastes land that could be growing food, raising food prices.
clickety_clack 2mo ago
Apparently (I’m relying on facts from Claude here), aviation uses about 100 billion gallons of oil a year and coconuts yield about 250 gal/acre, so assuming you can approximately replace them 1:1, you would need to plant about 400 million acres under coconut plantation, an area the size of Mexico. Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).
- mdp2021 2mo ago
  Yes, but nobody said that it would replace kerosene. Especially at this stage.
willtemperley 2mo ago
That infographic says it uses 16-20% more fuel per unit of thrust. That's a significant amount more weight for an aircraft to carry, but because carrying extra fuel also burns fuel, extra fuel use would compound exponentially. This would probably mean significantly more than 20% extra fuel would be required for long-haul flights.
- Animats 2mo ago
  Ouch. There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense. This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though. Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle. Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-coconut-tree-oil-copra-biodiesel https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
  - xp84 2mo ago
    ^^^ this I cringe thinking about more biofuel ideas getting forced through. Sure, let’s all spend a ton of petroleum energy on fertilizing, farm equipment, and processing, and raise food prices by using all the land for producing ethanol-corn, and jet fuel coconuts, just to get a slightly worse petroleum replacement fuel.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      There's always the air-gasoline route. That's right! With enough chemical engineering and materials science, we can extract jet fuel from air and water. You extract out CO2 from the air, and H2 from water. You turn the CO2 and hydrogen into carbon monoxide, and then Fischer-Tropsch chemistry and some other magic gets you hydrocarbons out the other end! The problem is the economics of that process can't compete with oil from the ground.
belorn 2mo ago
Are there really discarded parts? Usually when people talk about discarded parts, what they really mean is those not used in the first process. The article says "parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste", but just a quick glance seems to show that there are other products that uses those parts of the crop, like biodegradable packaging and animal feed. Turning it into fuel and burning it would compete with the other uses for those 30%.

zweifuss 2mo ago

Middle of the road, comparable to Sunflower oil. But they want to utilize waste products and a low energy conversion process.

mjevans 2mo ago
Is Jet Fuel really the best use of coconut oil? I'd imagine it's far better as a lubricant or ingredient in things more directly adjacent to human rather than mechanical use.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
fuzzfactor 2mo ago
I think with waste products there is more of a last-mile (first-mile?) collection issue. Regardless we're definitely seeing some processed bio-oil waste coming in to the diesel lab for analysis in the recent year or two. Looks to me like someone who is prospering based on coconut plantations would be the beneficiary from tapping a new market from a jet fuel process, and it probably could be made into a cleaner fuel than the waste-based bio-fuel.

zdragnar 2mo ago

All subsidies are wealth transfers. That's the whole point- to incentivize something that wouldn't otherwise happen at a scale the government deems to be of benefit or necessary. Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification. The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on. I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive. The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.

giantg2 2mo ago
A lot of food cost is due to food waste and convenience (refrigerated shipping, out of season crops, etc). There's already a lot food waste due to logistics and consumer preference.

mortoc 2mo ago

Are the people against bioengineered produce also be against us working towards super efficient coconuts or some other plant we designed to fill the same role?

qeternity 2mo ago

Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor? It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.

Spooky23 2mo ago
That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth. Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.
giantg2 2mo ago
"It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)." Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work. Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
- kube-system 2mo ago
  The economic landscape of farming is very bimodal. “Most farmers” (by headcount) are subsistence farmers who live in impoverished countries and don’t produce very much food because they are feeding themselves and their immediate community. The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  What do you mean by farmers? Of the rich farmers, yes, most do have a second job, but the farming does pay most of their income. It's not just a hobby. The second job is something that they can do in between the farm work. The other thing about farming is it's very much investment heavy. And so for a young farmer just getting started out, you're going to be working at farming and all of your income is going right back to paying things off. And so you're going to need a second job to put the food on the table for a few years. After 10 years, because of inflation, you would hope that your income has gone up while the payment you're making on existing land is kept the same, and so you don't have some left over, and so you can start only being a farmer. After, say, 30 years, most of your land is now paid off, and now you can take all that money that was going into paying off millions of farmlands, and you're making enough income that you could pay off of millions of dollars a loan, and you have no loans, and you are very well off. Of course after 30 years you're also getting close to retirement age and you're probably thinking well I'm gonna sell that farm off and now you have a lot of money that you can put into regular retirement acounts and enjoy a really nice retirement. But that means you're not a farmer and so the farmers themselves really have to live like the poor but they're on track to be very wealthy.

317070 2mo ago

> it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel. But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0] Coconuts could be a breakthrough! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel

the_sleaze_ 2mo ago
Saw a recent post about an electric plane - was pretty sweet let me dig it up. $5 worth of fuel! > https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-completes-first-flight-of-world-s-largest-electric-aircraft https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  These are strictly short-haul transports, aiming for about 200km (125 mi) electric range, 800 km (500 mi) in hybrid mode with reduced passenger/payload load. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace#ES-30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace#ES-30>
sixtyj 2mo ago
How many coconuts are on one tree and how many tons of coconuts would be needed to replace kerosene globally? I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible. BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well. Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less. I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation. Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…
- pfdietz 2mo ago
  Vaclav Smil so wildly mispredicted the trajectory of renewables that his worldview should be taken with heavy skepticism.

giantg2 2mo ago

"It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities" I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.

europoorean 2mo ago

> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities. Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.

b112 2mo ago
My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive. International markets and all that...
- stevenwoo 2mo ago
  NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. People constantly repeat this, but it's flat out wrong. The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.
    - Retric 2mo ago
      > cheaper than heather options Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern. Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc. Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.

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Gibbon1 2mo ago

Just through this out again, biofuels are dumb. Per acre a solar farm produces 30 times the energy per year as corn without most of the environmental concerns that growing corn has. You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss. Biofuels, dumb.

kylehotchkiss 2mo ago

Same rural communities raise pitchforks upon mention of any other demographic receiving wealth transfers.

Razengan 2mo ago

They literally grow on trees

KennyBlanken 2mo ago

> The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago A few years ago? Corn ethanol subsidies have been a thing for my entire life. It's a net-negative fuel. Costs more fuel to produce than it provides. It's literally just a way to waste water, farmland, huge quantities of diesel (burned by engines exempt from any sort of emissions), labor, etc. What changed is that ethanol has been forced by regulations into more and more use over time. That has driven up demand for corn, and one of the worse side effects is that a major food staple for Mexico has gone up dramatically in price. > effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, If you think that's bad, stop and think for a moment about what purpose the US military serves for rural America, both directly through personnel but also indirectly through all the incredibly wasteful equipment, service, and supply contracts. The US military's primary reason for existence is force projection, but its secondary is keeping rural American's uneployment from skyrocketing.