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… but exercise care. In an excerpt from his new book, We Are Eating the Earth- The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, Michael Grunwald with the story of Tim Searchinger, the cascading impact of ethanol production on climate change, and the importance of fighting for lost causes…

Something felt off.

Tim Searchinger lacked the proper credentials to say exactly what was off that day in the spring of 2003. He was a lawyer, not a scientist or economist. He was reading a complex technical paper on an unfamiliar topic, produced by well-respected researchers at the world-renowned Argonne National Laboratory. Sitting at his cluttered desk in the Environmental Defense Fund’s sixth-floor offices in Washington, D.C., overlooking the famous back entrance to the Hilton where President Ronald Reagan was shot, he just had a sense the paper didn’t add up.

Searchinger tended to distrust new information until he could study it to a pulp. He never assumed consensus views were correct, conventional wisdom was wise, or sophisticated-looking scientific analyses reflected reality. He questioned everything, so his unease that day didn’t feel particularly unusual. He had no inkling it would eventually lead him to a new profession—and the world to a new way of thinking about food, farming, land use, and climate change.

The Argonne study analyzed whether fueling cars with corn ethanol rather than gasoline reduced greenhouse gas emissions, which did not seem like a particularly urgent question in 2003. And Searchinger was a wetlands guy fighting to save the streams and swamps that provide kitchens and nurseries for fish and wildlife, not an energy-and-climate guy trying to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. So it was a bit odd that he would slog through such an obscure report.

But not too odd.

He was also an agriculture guy, because farms were the main threat to the wetlands he wanted to protect. And he was above all a details guy, a data sponge willing to soak up minutiae far too technical for less obsessive laymen. The revelatory stuff usually seemed to be hidden in arcane modeling assumptions and other fine print. He was a compulsive reader of boring papers, all the way through the footnotes, and he had learned from his uphill legal and political battles that knowledge could be a powerful weapon against money. He always did the reading, and his burden in life was that others didn’t.

Ethanol was just his latest uphill battle.

It was the most common form of alcohol, the fermented magic in beer, wine, and liquor. It was also a functional automotive fuel; it had powered the first internal combustion engine, and Henry Ford once called it the future of transportation. Gasoline turned out to be more efficient and better for engines, so ethanol mostly ended up in solvents and booze. But in the 1970s, ethanol distilled from corn—the “field corn,” or maize, grown by grain farmers, not the “sweet corn” you eat off the cob—had carved out a small role as an additive in US fuel markets.

That was the start of a twisted political love story. Farm interests, whose outsized political influence dated back to America’s origins as an agrarian nation, seized on ethanol as a new government gravy train. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, founded under President Abraham Lincoln for the express purpose of supporting farmers, backed ethanol as enthusiastically as it backed farm subsidies, farm loans, and other federal farm aid. And presidential candidates sucked up to farm interests so reliably that a West Wing episode lampooned the quadrennial tradition of ethanol pandering before the Iowa caucus, as the fictional future president Matt Santos considered denouncing subsidies he considered stupid and wasteful.

“You come out against ethanol, you’re dead meat,” an aide warned Santos. “Bambi would have a better shot at getting elected president of the NRA than you’ll have of getting a single vote in this caucus.”

The Midwestern grain interests behind ethanol did have serious political swat. The top ethanol producer was agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, whose former CEO helped finance the Watergate burglary, and whose reputation as an all-powerful force of corporate darkness would soon be satirized in The Informant! The U.S. industry owed its existence to a lavish tax break for domestic ethanol and a punitive tariff on foreign ethanol, both of which owed their existence to Big Ag lobbyists. The corn the industry distilled into fuel was also subsidized through “loan deficiency payments,” “counter-cyclical payments,” and a slew of other bureaucratically differentiated programs that all diverted taxpayer dollars into farmer wallets. The farm lobby usually got what it wanted out of Washington—not only subsidies and tax breaks, but exemptions from wetlands protections, pollution limits, and other regulations. Even the federal rule limiting the hours truckers could drive had a carve-out for agricultural deliveries.

Still, barely 1 percent of America’s fuel was ethanol, and barely 1 percent of America’s corn became ethanol. The issue wasn’t on Searchinger’s radar until Big Ag began pushing an ethanol mandate, and he began worrying it could become the corn industry’s new growth engine.

His concern had nothing to do with climate change, because that wasn’t on his radar, either. It wasn’t yet a front-burner issue in Washington, and he knew no more about it than the average newspaper reader. He was focused on preserving what was left of nature in farm country, and preventing polluted farm runoff from fouling rivers and streams. More ethanol would mean more cornfields, more pollution, and more drainage of the Midwest’s few remaining wetlands.

Most Americans seemed to think the middle of the country was somehow ordained to be amber waves of grain—he used to think so, too—but he always kept in mind that it had once been a vibrant landscape of tallgrass prairies and forested swamps, a temperate-zone Serengeti with spectacularly diverse plant communities and birds that darkened the sky. Washington had accelerated the near-total obliteration of that ecosystem, with incentives as well as rhetoric encouraging farmers to grow crops from “fence row to fence row,” and ethanol seemed like the latest excuse to complete Middle America’s metamorphosis into an uninterrupted cornfield. Searchinger was on the prowl for science he could use to prevent that, so when he heard about the Argonne paper, in those days before studies were routinely posted online, he called the lead author, a Chinese-born environmental scientist named Michael Wang, and asked him to FedEx it.

Unfortunately, Wang’s team had calculated that ethanol generated 20 percent fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline, a modest but measurable improvement. Wang had helped pioneer the “life-cycle analyses” that were becoming standard in the field, and the emissions model known as GREET that he developed at Argonne was considered state-of-the-art, while Searchinger had never even read a climate study. So he didn’t really have standing to object.

But he did know models could mislead, because one of his professional obsessions was exposing how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cooked the books of cost-benefit analyses to justify its own ridiculously destructive water projects. He had learned from Army Corps documents how economic and scientific models could be structured and twisted to reach convenient conclusions, how garbage in plus garbage assumptions could produce garbage out. And when he started thumbing through the ethanol study, he had familiar bad vibes.

Wang had found that drilling oil and refining it into gasoline emitted much fewer greenhouse gases than planting, fertilizing, and harvesting corn and refining it into ethanol. Initially, Searchinger was confused: If the agro-industrial complex was twice as carbon-intensive as the petro-industrial complex, why would ethanol have a smaller carbon footprint?

The study’s answer was that cornfields, unlike oil wells, were carbon sinks. The Argonne team assumed that growing corn on a farm offset the tailpipe emissions from burning corn in an engine, because cornstalks sucked carbon out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. The climate case for farm-grown fuels was that ethanol merely recycled carbon, while gasoline liberated carbon that had been buried for eons. It made sense that ethanol, a renewable fuel, would be climate-friendlier than gasoline, a fossil fuel. “Renewable” sounded clean and green, while “fossil” evoked zombies coming back from the dead to destroy the earth.

Searchinger’s spidey-sense kept tingling, though. His father, another question-everything guy, liked to quote H. L. Mencken: “For every complex human problem, there’s a solution that’s clear, simple and wrong.” That’s what ethanol felt like. And the more he thought about the study, the less he understood its conclusions.

Yes, corn soaked up carbon as it grew. But it soaked up just as much carbon whether it was grown for fuel or food! Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?

That led back to his original concern: If more corn was diverted from food to fuel, how would the lost food be replaced? Presumably, Midwest farmers would plant more corn, converting more wetlands into farmland that would get blasted with more chemicals. Again, he wasn’t focused on the climate impact, just the environmental impact of losing habitat and increasing pollution. But he had a hunch the Argonne researchers and their spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.

Searchinger loved figuring things out, and he was on the verge of figuring something out that would transform climate analysis.

Uncharacteristically, though, he lost interest.

For one thing, it became clear that climate would be irrelevant to the debate over the proposed “Renewable Fuels Standard.” With America at war in Iraq, ethanol’s boosters were touting the mandate as a win-win that would reduce reliance on Middle Eastern oil while propping up demand for Midwestern corn. They weren’t touting it as a climate solution, because Washington wasn’t looking for climate solutions. The Senate had unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol a few years earlier, and Congress had ignored the issue ever since.

It also became clear the biofuels debate would be another charade controlled by farm interests and farm-friendly politicians. President George W. Bush had genuflected to ethanol in Iowa, as future presidents always do. (Even The West Wing’s Santos caved.) Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, whose top aide later became an ethanol lobbyist, and Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois—who also became an ethanol lobbyist, before going to jail in a child molestation scandal—were both farm-state biofuels boosters.

Searchinger did try to lobby some non-Midwestern politicians to oppose the mandate, arguing it would punish their constituents at the pump to subsidize out-of-state agribusinesses. But even an aide to Democratic Senator Jon Corzine, a former Wall Street titan from corn-free New Jersey, sheepishly admitted his boss couldn’t buck the ethanol lobby, because he might need Iowans someday.

Come on, Searchinger pleaded, the guy who ran Goldman Sachs thinks he’s running for president?

“Tim, they’re all running for president,” the aide replied.

Searchinger sometimes joked that he was the patron saint of almost-lost causes, because he spent his days failing to save wetlands, failing to stop farms from degrading the environment, and failing to reform the Army Corps. He didn’t go looking for uphill battles—he’s a generally friendly guy with no particular lust for conflict—but he didn’t shy away from them, and as an enviro in ag world, he ended up in a lot of them. Even his victories felt temporary, because defenders of nature have to win again and again to keep wild places wild, while despoilers of nature only have to win once. And unlike campaigns to save the whales or the Grand Canyon, causes that inspired public outrage and sympathetic press, his fine-print fights to limit the damage from American agriculture went mostly unnoticed.

Usually, he was fine with that. He was a relatively happy warrior who believed knowledge could at least sometimes be power. But sometimes, power was power, and the anti-ethanol cause felt unusually lost. ADM, which owned half of America’s ethanol plants, seemed to own half of Congress, too. The proposed mandate wasn’t big enough to transform the Midwest, anyway, so he moved on to issues where victory was at least conceivable.

In retrospect, he’s embarrassed by how much he failed to grasp in 2003. At the time, he was totally unaware of the climate benefits of the wetlands he was fighting to save. He also knew almost nothing about international agriculture and its intrusions into tropical rainforests, so he overlooked how mandating farm-grown fuel in America could trigger deforestation and food shortages abroad. It certainly hadn’t dawned on him that biofuels represented a larger land-use problem that threatened humanity’s future on a planet with limited land to use.

Then again, it hadn’t dawned on anyone else, either.

Searchinger would later return to ethanol and climate, making scientific and economic connections the field’s scientists and economists had missed. He would then figure out how agriculture was eating the earth, and create the first serious plan for preventing that. It was an odd plot twist for an urban lawyer whose closest encounter with farm life growing up had been the petting zoo in Central Park.

But not too odd.

Taking on biofuels, and then the broader food and climate problem, required a wonk-crusader smart and stubborn enough to master the intricacies of esoteric models in unfamiliar disciplines, intellectually arrogant enough to believe he could parachute into the new fields and prove the experts wrong, and foolishly romantic enough to believe his impertinent crusades could help save the world. That’s always been who he is…

“How Big Agriculture Mislead the Public About the Benefits of Biofuels,” from @mikegrunwald.bsky.social‬ via @literaryhub.bsky.social‬.

For more, see this World Resources Institute reports authored by Searchinger: “Why Dedicating Land to Bioenergy Won’t Curb Climate Change.”

* John Greenleaf Whittier

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As we tackle tradeoffs, we might spare a thought for James Lovelock; he died on this date in 2022 (which was also his 103rd birthday). An independent scientist, environmentalist, and futurist, he  invented (in 1957) the Electron Capture Detector, a portable analytical instrument able to detect infinitesimal traces of halogenated organic compounds. The device revealed once untraceable amounts in the biosphere, of man-made chemicals such as CFCs or pesticide pollutants. French philosopher Bruno Latour compared that technological advance to the leap when Galileo’s telescope invention could peer deeper into space, revealing so much previously unseen.

He is better known for his Gaia Hypothesis, which he developed in the 1960s while designing scientific instruments for NASA and working with Royal Dutch Shell. Lovelock suggested that the Earth functions as a planet-sized superorganism—subterranean bacteria to the ice crystals of the stratosphere, working in a gigantic living network.

For more on the remarkable man, his accomplishments, and the Gaia Hypothesis, see Jon Watts‘ The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory.

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