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‘Magical thinking’: hopes for sustainable jet fuel not realistic, report finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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The advantage of making fuels from plants isn't in them burning cleaner, it's in the fact that growing the plants takes carbon out of the atmosphere. That means that the carbon released upon burning them was carbon that was already recently in the atmosphere, as opposed to being deep underground like it was with fossil fuels
That doesn't negate the issues of land use changes and similar, but in terms of plain old net carbon emissions they absolutely are better
The caveat of finding "better" methods is that it excuses continuing or expanding the things we do that are the core problems of rapid growth, consumption, and a throwaway society. And like you said, they have their own issues that might become problematic with growth in that process. Not to say that we shouldn't try to improve what we can, just a point that being better than the worst way to do things isn't all that great either.
The word "sustainable" in the title is one of those greenwashing terms to sell a product and keep the status quo of business as usual. As the report shows.
For sure, I'm not disagreeing with the article. The problems raised by this report are not what the comment I was replying to raised, and I think that we should criticise these things for their actual problems.
And I guess not all of the plant is something that can be burned as fuel so done right it should be a net negative
No, under normal circumstances, the part of the plant that isn't burned eventually also decomposes and the carbon continues in the cycle. You'd have to explicitly do something to prevent it (e.g. sink it in a bog) to make it net negative.