UPDATE: The Supreme Court just decided to hear the case. Our piece on the case (above) explains why this is a good thing, regardless of what you think of pesticides. apnews.com/article/supr...

The issue with restricting glyphosate isn't just cost. A) The weight of the evidence indicates its not carcinogenic in humans at the rates used. B) Alternative herbicides farmers would replace it with are equally or more toxic. C)Reduced use would increase tillage thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-...

The issue with restricting glyphosate isn't just cost. A) The weight of the evidence indicates its not carcinogenic in humans at the rates used. B) Alternative herbicides farmers would replace it with are equally or more toxic. C)Reduced use would increase tillage
thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-...

UPDATE: The Supreme Court just decided to hear the case. Our piece on the case (above) explains why this is a good thing, regardless of what you think of pesticides. apnews.com/article/supr...

While some grazed land is arid, much is not & could store more carbon if not grazed. Our research shows that the large land footprint of grass-fed beef means it has an even bigger carbon footprint than typically thought. It also means improving productivity has big benefits. t.co/51DzPkAypR

Link to the full article: www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/california...

You can follow Lauren (or bug her to join bsky) on X @lrntex

But even if the LCFS discredits crop based fuels entirely, it should reconsider whether to keep subsidizing biofuels at all. After all, isn’t the future electric vehicles? Why keep paying to put soybeans and beef tallow in the tanks of cars? Is this the best use of resources?

If California wants to fix its frankly scandalous record on the LCFS it needs to take a VERY hard look at the program. To start, it should make sure we don’t end up forcing Californians to pay for crop-based SAF, which has all the same problems we previously detailed:

It also credits biofuels with lowering emissions by *decreasing global food consumption*. Of course, leading people to go hungry indeed produces fewer emissions. It’s also morally wrong!

Why does GTAP produce such low carbon intensities? It’s rather Orwellian. The model simply does not allow producers to convert unmanaged forest (something that happens all the time in the real world).

Surprising no one, empirical studies now coming out find land use change effects orders of magnitude higher than the ex-ante estimates produced by GTAP. Biofuel subsidies are indeed spurring significant deforestation and land conversion in the US and around the world.

How did this happen? It’s a classic tale of regulatory capture with a healthy dose of technocratic hubris. Captured CARB members insisted on the use of black box general equilibrium models (namely GTAP) that spit out astonishingly low carbon intensities for crop based biofuels.

Exactly. The Guardian authors created that graph. The original results in the paper report percent change in yield "relative to counterfactual yields", not change in yield from today. They dont report predictions of actual yields, but note innovation will likely keep raising yields

Slower yield growth is still very important. Cutting emissions will help reduce hunger. But this is misrepresents the study, whose authors wrote "Our projections are deviations from local baseline yield trends, which have historically been positive and will probably remain generally positive"