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Green Jet Fuel Is Causing Problems For Biden's Inflation Reduction Act

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Updated: Aug 09, 2022

• The Inflation Reduction Act budget reconciliation bill has passed the Senate and will now move for approval in the House.
• 
  
• As well as extending the existing biodiesel and renewable diesel tax credit, the bill provides a higher tax credit for the production of SAF.
• 
  
• NATSO and SIGMA have warned that this differential in the bill will make biodiesel and renewable diesel more expensive, increasing the price of goods hauled by trucks.

As the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act budget reconciliation bill, U.S. fuel retailers warned that including higher tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) would reduce the supply of biodiesel and renewable diesel as all those fuels compete for feedstock. 

The bill, which is now set to move for approval in the House, is part of the Biden Administration's efforts to lay the foundations for reducing America's greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions from the aviation sector.  

The bill extends the existing biodiesel and renewable diesel tax credit, but it also provides a higher tax credit for the production of SAF. 

This higher tax credit for the greener aviation fuel would reduce the availability of renewable diesel and biodiesel, associations of U.S. fuel retailers say. The lower availability of renewable diesel would further increase the cost of everyday household goods which are transported by trucks, NATSO, a national trade association representing travel plaza and truck stop owners and operators, warned after the bill was unveiled. 

"American consumers will pay more for all goods hauled by truck"

NATSO, together with SIGMA, a trade association representing fuel marketers and convenience store chain retailers in the United States and Canada, strongly urged lawmakers to oppose the Inflation Reduction Act unless it provides tax parity between the biodiesel tax credit (BTC) and the proposed SAF tax credit.

"This legislation purports to create a 'technology neutral' clean fuels tax scheme, which fuel retailers have long supported. Favorable treatment for SAF flies in the face of this approach," said David Fialkov, NATSO Executive Vice President of Government Affairs.  

"SAF is less beneficial for the environment than renewable diesel and is going to cost taxpayers more. Providing more favorable tax treatment for a technology that has fewer environmental benefits undermines the intellectual integrity of the climate provisions in this bill," Fialkov added. 

"The trucking industry delivers more than 80 percent of America's goods and relies on biofuels, like renewable diesel and biodiesel, to keep emissions low. If Congress passes a higher tax incentive for SAF, America's supply of biofuels will become limited and more expensive. American consumers will pay more for all goods hauled by truck," NATSO and SIGMA said at the end of July. 

SAF Incentives Needed For Lower-Carbon Aviation

While fuel retailers call for equal treatment of renewable diesel and SAF in the new tax credit provisions, the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) welcomed the Senate approval of an SAF tax credit that would increase the production and availability of the fuel. SAF is expected to help the industry achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, NBAA says. 

"Production tax credits in the bill would greatly reduce the cost of commercially available SAF — made from sustainable feedstocks like used cooking oil, crop residues and municipal solid waste — making air travel more sustainable for Americans without increasing costs to consumers," RMI, a nonprofit organization promoting the clean energy transition, said in comments before the Senate passed the bill. 

According to BP, which has an SAF business, Air bp, "SAF gives an impressive reduction of up to 80% in carbon emissions over the lifecycle of the fuel compared to traditional jet fuel it replaces, depending on the sustainable feedstock used, production method and the supply chain to the airport." 

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has recently called for governments to urgently put in place large-scale incentives to rapidly expand the use of SAF as aviation pursues its commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

"Investments are in place to expand SAF annual production from the current 125 million liters to 5 billion by 2025. With effective government incentives, production could reach 30 billion liters by 2030, which would be a tipping point for SAF production and utilization," IATA said in June. 

Feedstock Displacement 

But fuel marketers and some environmental campaigners say that higher incentives for SAF production compared to the tax credits for biodiesel would displace renewable diesel production and could also lead to a loss of land and biodiversity because of the expected higher demand for lipid-based feedstocks. 

"This additional incentive for SAF will undercut and eventually eliminate America's biodiesel and renewable diesel market as disproportionate pressure is placed on feedstock," NATSO and SIGMA say. 

The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), for example, in its call for a cap on lipid-based feedstocks in California's biomass-based diesel (BBD) fuels, said a cap would avoid global displacement of vegetable oils that would contribute to negative impacts on global food and feed markets, deforestation, cropland expansion, rising greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity loss. 

"Increasing the global supply of vegetable oils, directly or indirectly, necessarily comes at the cost of forests and other natural lands," ICCT said in a report earlier this month, noting that a displacement of vegetable oils would contribute to food price spikes and deforestation.    

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

 Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.

“A book that invites us to dream of a reconfigured world where the borders between nation states no longer control and define us.”  – Stella Dadzie Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished. Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact migrants and citizens. Against Borders: The Case for Abolition by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha is a passionate manifesto for border abolition, arguing that we must transform society and our relationships to one another, and build a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay. Buy now Here’s why a border-free world would be better than hostile immigration policies | Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha write for the Guardian.   “Against Borders demonstrates the clarifying power of applying abolitionist politics to the issue of borders. In doing so, it achieves a rare unity of theory and practice, combining profound analysis with pointers to radical action.” – Arun Kundnani “The arguments in this elegant and powerful book are entirely reasonable and pragmatic and yet utterly revolutionary, proposing an abolitionist political imagination and a horizon of liberation.” – Michael Hardt “A refreshing, well-argued and moving proposal for 'non-reformist reforms' that would demolish one of the cruellest components of the capitalist state, written with a non-sectarian openness and a utopian imagination” – Owen Hatherley No walls, no borders reading list A reading list on the changing role of borders and how we consider freedom of movement, globalization, and humanitarian crises across the world.

How not to solve the climate change problem

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; 

Affiliated Faculty, University of Auckland
Tue, August 9, 2022

THE CONVERSATION

This direct air capture plant in Iceland was designed to capture 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Climeworks 2021 via AP Photos

When politicians talk about reaching “net zero” emissions, they’re often counting on trees or technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air. What they don’t mention is just how much these proposals or geoengineering would cost to allow the world to continue burning fossil fuels.

There are many proposals for removing carbon dioxide, but most make differences only at the edges, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to increase relentlessly, even through the pandemic.

I’ve been working on climate change for over four decades. Let’s take a minute to come to grips with some of the rhetoric around climate change and clear the air, so to speak.

What’s causing climate change?

As has been well established now for several decades, the global climate is changing, and that change is caused by human activities.

When fossil fuels are burned for energy or used in transportation, they release carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas that is the main cause of global heating. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries. As more carbon dioxide is added, its increasing concentration acts like a blanket, trapping energy near Earth’s surface that would otherwise escape into space.

When the amount of energy arriving from the Sun exceeds the amount of energy radiating back into space, the climate heats up. Some of that energy increases temperatures, and some increases evaporation and fuels storms and rains.

How the greenhouse effect works. EPA

Because of these changes in atmospheric composition, the planet has warmed by an estimated 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 F) since about 1880 and is well on the way to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which was highlighted as a goal not to be crossed if possible by the Paris Agreement. With the global heating and gradual increases in temperature have come increases in all kinds of weather and climate extremes, from flooding to drought and heat waves, that cause huge damage, disruption and loss of life.

Studies shows that global carbon dioxide emissions will need to reach net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury to have a chance of limiting warming to even 2 C (3.6 F).

Currently, the main source of carbon dioxide is China. But accumulated emissions matter most, and the United States leads, closely followed by Europe, China and others.

Estimated shares of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2018 compared with cumulative emissions over time, based on data released by BP. Kevin Trenberth, Author provided

What works to slow climate change?

Modern society needs energy, but it does not have to be from fossil fuels.

Studies show that the most effective way to address the climate change problem is to decarbonize the economies of the world’s nations. This means sharply increasing use of renewable energy – solar and wind cost less than new fossil fuel plants in much of the world today – and the use of electric vehicles.

Unfortunately, this changeover to renewables has been slow, due in large part to the the huge and expensive infrastructure related to fossil fuels, along with the vast amount of dollars that can buy influence with politicians.
What doesn’t work?

Instead of drastically cutting emissions, companies and politicians have grasped at alternatives. These include geoengineering; carbon capture and storage, including “direct air capture”; and planting trees.

Here’s the issue:

Geoengineering often means “solar radiation management,” which aims to emulate a volcano and add particulates to the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation back to space and produce a cooling. It might partially work, but it could have concerning side effects.

The global warming problem is not sunshine, but rather that infrared radiation emitted from Earth is being trapped by greenhouse gases. Between the incoming solar and outgoing radiation is the whole weather and climate system and the hydrological cycle. Sudden changes in these particles or poor distribution could have dramatic effects.

Some methods of solar radiation management that have been proposed. 

Chelsea Thompson, NOAA/CIRES

The last major volcanic eruption, of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, sent enough sulfur dioxide and particulates into the stratosphere that it produced modest cooling, but it also caused a loss of precipitation over land. It cooled the land more than the ocean so that monsoon rains moved offshore, and longer term it slowed the water cycle.

Carbon capture and storage has been researched and tried for well over a decade but has sizable costs. Only about a dozen industrial plants in the U.S. currently capture their carbon emissions, and most of it is used to enhance drilling for oil.

Direct air capture – technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air – is being developed in several places. It uses a lot of energy, though, and while that could potentially be dealt with by using renewable energy, it’s still energy intensive.

Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, plants a tree in 2008. 

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Planting trees is often embraced as a solution for offsetting corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Trees and vegetation take up carbon dioxide though photosynthesis and produce wood and other plant material. It’s relatively cheap.

But trees aren’t permanent. Leaves, twigs and dead trees decay. Forests burn. Recent studies show that the risks to trees from stress, wildfires, drought and insects as temperatures rise will also be larger than expected.
How much does all this cost?

Scientists have been measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958 and elsewhere. The average annual increase in carbon dioxide concentration has accelerated, from about 1 part per million by volume per year in the 1960s to 1.5 in the 1990s, to 2.5 in recent years since 2010.

This relentless increase, through the pandemic and in spite of efforts in many countries to cut emissions, shows how enormous the problem is.

Carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The monthly mean, in red, rises and falls with the growing seasons. The black line is adjusted for the average seasonal cycle. Kevin Trenberth, based on NOAA data, CC BY-ND

Usually carbon removal is discussed in terms of mass, measured in megatons – millions of metric tons – of carbon dioxide per year, not in parts per million of volume. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.5x10¹⁵ metric tons, but as carbon dioxide (molecular weight 42) is heavier than air (molecular weight about 29), 1 part per million by volume of carbon dioxide is about 7.8 billion metric tons.

According to the World Resources Institute, the range of costs for direct air capture vary between US0 and 0 per metric ton of carbon dioxide removed today, depending on the technology, energy source and scale of deployment. Even if costs fell to 0 per metric ton, the cost of reducing the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 1 part per million is around 0 billion.

Keep in mind that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from about 280 parts per million before the industrial era to around 420 today, and it is currently rising at more than 2 parts per million per year.

Tree restoration on one-third to two-thirds of suitable acres is estimated to be able to remove about 7.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050 without displacing agricultural land, by WRI’s calculations. That would be more than any other pathway. This might sound like a lot, but 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide is 7 billion metric tons, and so this is less than 1 part per million by volume. The cost is estimated to be up to per metric ton. So even with trees, the cost to remove 1 part per million by volume could be as much as 0 billion.

Geoengineering is also expensive.

So for hundreds of billions of dollars, the best prospect with these strategies is a tiny dent of 1 part per million by volume in the carbon dioxide concentration.

This arithmetic highlights the tremendous need to cut emissions. There is no viable workaround.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Kevin Trenberth, University of Auckland.

Read more:

Trees aren’t a climate change cure-all – 2 new studies on the life and death of trees in a warming world show why

Why the oil industry’s pivot to carbon capture and storage – while it keeps on drilling – isn’t a climate change solution

Climate change is relentless: Seemingly small shifts have big consequences

Climate change: 

We should rethink the best tools

for energy transition, new paper argues

Grace O'Donnell

·Assistant Editor

Mon, August 8, 2022 

For years, economists championed carbon pricing as the most economically efficient way to transition the energy sector to net zero — but that may no longer be the case.

According to a new NBER working paper, carbon pricing policies such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs may not be better than other options.

Using 2019 data to model the U.S. electricity grid, researchers found that energy intensity standards and clean energy subsidies may be just as efficient as carbon pricing policies.

“I think the first thing it should do is end the mantra among some environmental economists that carbon taxes are the best mechanism or the even more extreme view, which is carbon taxes will solve the problem entirely,” Severin Borenstein, one of the paper’s co-authors and a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, told Yahoo Finance. “I think that neither of those is true. And so we need to take a more nuanced look.”

In this May 18, 2011, file photo, a worker drives a tractor through a tree farm in North Perry, Ohio, near the cooling towers of the Perry Nuclear Power Plant. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta, File)

Putting a price on carbon emissions, setting clean electricity standards, and subsidizing clean energy are all ways the market can nudge power producers toward generating electricity from clean sources like wind, solar, and hydropower while eliminating emissions that come from burning fossil fuels.

Experts say there is a narrow window of opportunity to act to limit "irreversible" shifts in the climate, which are already costing global economies billions and harming human health.

In the U.S., electricity generation accounts for at least a quarter of emissions, with 60% of electricity coming from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas. Borenstein emphasized that this paper specifically addresses the electricity sector, and that the model doesn't apply to other sectors like transportation.

“I think the real question is: If the goal was to get to the clean electricity grid and then use clean electricity to decarbonize other sectors of the economy... a nice virtue of a subsidy-driven route to decarbonizing the grid is that it actually results in low electricity prices for consumers," Ryan Kellogg, the paper's co-author and professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, told Yahoo Finance.

Lightning strikes close to wind turbines in a wind energy park during a thunderstorm near Sieversdorf, eastern Germany, on August 28, 2016. (PATRICK PLEUL/DPA/AFP via Getty Images)

'The cost of natural gas plays a big role'

If climate change is the result of a market failure, as some experts argue, then carbon pricing aims to correct that failure.

Carbon pricing policies tend to fall into two categories: a carbon tax which puts price on each ton of greenhouse gas emissions, or a cap-and-trade program that sells emissions permits and allows businesses to trade among themselves.

By making pollution more expensive for operators, carbon pricing is seen as a particularly compelling tool because it targets the biggest polluters first — namely, coal plants.

That may also be true of other policy options like clean electricity standards and subsidies, the researchers argued, due to a correlation between emissions and operating costs. They found that overall emissions throughout an energy transition are just 2.2% higher under a clean energy standard policy than under a carbon tax.

“One of the things that we found — and this was actually a little bit surprising to us just how stark the result — was that plants that have very high emissions rates — coal plants — also tended to have much higher ongoing operating costs than combined cycle gas turbines,” Kellogg said.

Two graphs illustrating the relationship between CO2 emissions and generators' ongoing operating costs. When gas prices are at a 2019 baseline level, coal plants have higher costs than natural gas combined cycle plants. (Source: NBER)

This "happy coincidence," as Kellogg put it, means that when gas prices are relatively low, private operators would be incentivized to shut down coal plants first anyway because they're more costly to run.

However, "the cost of natural gas plays a big role," Borenstein said. "Because if natural gas is expensive, then a clean energy standard will have companies shutting down natural gas plants while still running coal plants. So then the correlation between the pollution and the private cost falls apart."

Though high natural gas prices have been a key theme in 2022, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and pandemic recovery, they're unlikely to stay that way, Borenstein argued. In particular, as decarbonization gains a stronger foothold, it will in all probability drive gas prices down over time.

"The futures market is predicting prices will be down in the $4 range within a few years," he said. "And if we really start to decarbonize rapidly, I think they'll be a lot lower than that because there will be very low demand for natural gas. So I think that if we're going to talk about a scenario going to zero or near zero emissions, that scenario will almost certainly be accompanied by cheap natural gas."

The markup on electricity prices

There is a second argument in favor of carbon pricing, which is that it shapes behavior and encourages the biggest power consumers to reduce their energy usage — thereby driving down carbon emissions.

The paper suggested this particular argument may also be flawed because many consumers already pay marked-up electricity prices — a trend which will likely increase throughout the energy transition.

The amount of energy a household consumes makes up just one portion of what they pay the utility. Electricity bills also incorporate the utility's procurement costs and fixed costs for building infrastructure like transmission lines. Utilities charge consumers for these other costs per kilowatt hour rather than as a fixed fee.

Building maintenance workers change a light bulb near a courtroom in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., January 23, 2020. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

As a result, in many areas of the country, the prices consumers are paying already exceed the social cost of electricity generation. Carbon pricing would likely add on to price increases without necessarily sending an accurate price signal to consumers.

"What I pay to consume electricity is already quite a bit more than the cost of that what it actually costs to generate that electricity," Kellogg said. “So that function of carbon pricing of increasing prices isn’t one that we actually need.”

Borenstein explained that the effect is more pronounced in states that have already put decarbonization policies in place. In California, for instance, the cost of electricity is much higher than the social cost of burning fossil fuels. In the Upper Midwest, prices tend to fall below that cost due to higher rates of burning coal.

The model found that during the energy transition, a carbon pricing scenario would result in the highest wholesale energy prices while clean energy subsidies would result in the lowest prices.

"In fact, if anything, we'd like electricity to cost less in order to encourage electrification and substitution away from other fossil fuels," Borenstein noted.

A chart showing wholesale electricity prices throughout the energy transition under three different scenarios (Source: NBER)

Distributing green transition costs

As state and federal governments move to accelerate the energy transition, the question of who pays is becoming more salient.

These policy tools vary in how they distribute those costs across consumers, private enterprises, and governments, and they all have tradeoffs that policymakers will need to carefully consider.

“One way to maybe put a really fine point on it," Kellogg said, "is if you want to have a green transition, there's a question of: Do we want to pay for that green transition through retail electricity prices, which is what carbon pricing would do, ... or do we want to pay for that green transition through the public budget, which is what the clean energy subsidy would do?”

Locals walk past electricity pylons during frequent power outages from South African utility Eskom, caused by its aging coal-fired plants, in Soweto, South Africa, July 3, 2022. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko

The authors stressed that these findings don't mean that carbon pricing is a less efficient tool but that other tools like subsidies and clean energy standards might be more economically efficient options than previously thought.

Carbon taxes have other added benefits. For instance, they are the only policy tool that brings in revenue, which governments can use to fund other clean energy projects, tax credits, or send rebates to households to offset higher electricity prices, as Canada has done.

“Economic efficiency is not the only standard, but economic efficiency is pretty important," Borenstein stated. "Economic efficiency is the size of the pie. And if you do something inefficient, you are making the pie smaller."

Grace is an assistant editor for Yahoo Finance.

Civil rights groups, including 

Al Sharpton-led organization, 

urge USDA to fix ‘dietary racism’ 

in school lunch programs

Brad Dress  

Tue, August 9, 2022

Twenty-eight civil rights and health care groups announced Tuesday they have requested that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) address “dietary racism” in national school lunch programs, raising concerns to the federal agency about forcing millions of minority children to drink cow’s milk without allowing them a healthier alternative.

In a letter to the USDA’s Equity Commission, the groups said the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) only incentivizes dairy milk, a policy they called “inherently inequitable and socially unjust” because children of color are more likely to be lactose intolerant — meaning they cannot fully digest sugars in dairy and can suffer from adverse effects after consumption.

The NSLP covers 30 million children in 100,000 schools across the U.S., a program the civil rights groups said children of color are historically overrepresented in.

“If Black lives matter, so does our health and nutrition, but the National School Lunch Program has consistently failed children of color,” said Milton Mills, a Washington, D.C., urgent care physician who has researched the topic, in a statement. “Either schoolchildren drink the milk they’re given and suffer in class while they’re trying to learn, or they go without a nutritionally significant portion of their meal.”

The letter was signed by leading national groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, the Maryland chapter of the NAACP, Switch4Good, the Center for a Humane Economy and the National Action Network Washington Bureau, which was founded by civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton.

The USDA reimburses schools covered under the 76-year-old NSLP if they provide fluid milk during meals, which does not cover soy milk or other types of organic milk. Dairy milk must be served with every meal.

The federal agency does allow a nutritional substitute, but that requires a written statement from a student’s parent or guardian and schools must notify the state of a substitution. A written doctor’s note may also be required, according to the civil rights and health organizations, which, they added, most families cannot secure.

“It is patently discriminatory to require a doctor’s note for a nearly ubiquitous condition,” they wrote in the letter. “Black, Native American, Asian and Latino kids are being punished for their race and heritage.”

According to the civil rights and health groups, 80 percent of Black and Latino people, more than 90 percent of Asians, and more than 80 percent of Indigenous Americans are lactose intolerant, compared to 15 percent of White people.

They estimated that millions of minority children could be affected in the classroom because of the USDA policy, urging the agency to allow soy milk, a federally recognized nutritional product, as an official substitute in the NSLP.

“It is hard to imagine a more inequitable and socially unjust USDA practice than the force feeding of milk to [minority] children in our schools,” the letter reads.

“Until children of color are properly provided for in the USDA-funded NSLP, the ‘And Justice for All’ posters that the agency requires participating public schools to display in their lunch rooms is simply empty rhetoric as injustices are visited on millions of underserved children each day,” they added.

Eric Trump's Accidental Confession About His Father Has Twitter Users Howling

Eric Trump's Accidental Confession About His Father Has Twitter Users Howling

Ed Mazza Wed, August 10, 2022 

Eric Trump may have revealed just a little too much about how the White House operated under his father.

One day after the FBI executed a search warrant on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the son of the former president claimed that President Joe Biden must have approved the action. His reasoning: That’s how it worked when Trump was in office.

Here’s the clip from Fox News:

Most modern presidents have taken pains to distance themselves from Justice Department operations with political implications. In this case, the White House said Biden found out about the search warrant the same way as everyone else: from the news.

But as Twitter users were quick to point out, Eric Trump’s comments appeared to admit that wasn’t the case in the Trump White House:

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.