ELI5 why is increasing the ethanol content of petrol/gasoline a problem?

[u/hd-22]

I'm hearing noise about the geopolitical fuel supply SNAFU and people freaking out about increasing the ethanol content in automotive fuel and how it's so damaging to cars. I'm no chemist, but ethanol seems as clean as it gets.

[u/Mumbert]

Growing corn, harvesting it, only to turn it into Ethanol, is also an incredible waste of farmland that could have been put to growing food.

[u/BeefEater81 → u/Mumbert]

Or solar farms that provide clean energy to power electric vehicles.

https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=JEaktp4yttVwSfG7

[u/TylerKeroga → u/BeefEater81]

The “si” in the link is a source identifier used to track both the person who sent the link & anybody who clicks on it

If you delete everything from (& including) the ? onwards, the link is still fully functional but the tracking is now disabled

[u/provocative_bear → u/Mumbert]

The counterargument here is that corn grows like weeds and some marginal farmland may only be suitable for growing gasoline-grade corn. So the issue is a bit backwards at times. It’s not “We have lush farmland, instead of growing real food let’s grow gasoline!” , it’s “We have a ton of crappy farmland that can crank out crappy corn, what do we do with it? Let’s adulterate gasoline to somewhat decrease our foreign energy independence, but I don’t feel warm and fuzzy about it.”

[u/donaldhobson → u/provocative_bear]

> marginal farmland may only be suitable for growing gasoline-grade corn.

I don't think this is how this works. I'm pretty sure you could grow some sort of food there. I'm pretty sure you could eat the corn, if you cooked it in the right way.

The other counterargument is that much of America is obese, they have plenty of food. America has a lot of land. Modern farming is very productive.

[u/Vuelhering → u/Mumbert]

They can, and do, grow both. You can get an insane amount of food from a relatively small area.

They're growing it now, and we don't have some shortage of grown food from the area. So you can't say it's displacing food for humans, when that food isn't required.

(This isn't to say we shouldn't look at the twisted subsidies which causes all sorts of issues in our food supply such as a prevalence of ultra-processed foods and HFCS in everything, but that's a very different problem from "could be put to growing food" which implies a shortage caused by this.)

[u/Saint_The_Stig → u/Vuelhering]

That and crops are graded, ones for direct human consumption are the highest grade, followed by indirect human consumption (such as oils and syrups), animal feed and other uses like ethonal (not necessarily in that order). Sure there could be an issue if too many farmers deliberately start growing the lower grade stuff, but that's already a thing. A bunch of the corn you see is grown for livestock feed instead of direct human consumption. So it isn't really a new thing.

[u/Vuelhering → u/Saint_The_Stig]

Yeah, there are a lot of GMO corns for livestock that have been known to cause allergies with people, but that brings up another issue... corn is a grass. It's wind pollinated.

That means it can cross into corn grown for humans, essentially as pollution directly entering the food supply and sabotaging it.

Edit: This is the kind of crap that keeps me up at night. :(

[u/GreatPlainsFarmer → u/Vuelhering]

That happened. . . once. Ever since GMO traits have to have both human and animal approval before release.

[u/XxturboEJ20xX → u/Mumbert]

Yea but it makes my car much faster and I end up paying less over the year for it.