OPINION
The U.S. agriculture lobby has long promoted ethanol for cars. If President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” becomes law, the industry would be given tax credits for producing crop-based fuel for planes, too, despite evidence it would spur deforestation and increase emissions.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Republicans are pushing under President Trump would roll back almost all the clean energy incentives that Democrats enacted under President Biden, shredding federal support for solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles, and other climate-friendly technologies. But it would make a lavish exception for one supposedly green form of energy that isn’t green at all: farm-grown jet fuels.
Aviation, which generated about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize, and the U.S. aviation industry has committed to using so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” to reach its net-zero climate goals. But using crops like corn and soybeans to produce fuel instead of food not only increases food prices and global hunger, it spurs farmers around the world to tear down more forests and plow up more grasslands to create new farmland to replace the lost food. That’s why farm-grown biofuels have been a climate problem masquerading as a climate solution for cars, and they would have the same problem in planes.
In a particularly egregious policy twist, the GOP bill would not only extend Biden’s tax credit for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) until 2031, it would also ban any consideration of those land-use emissions when calculating which fuels are sustainable. That would be like banning consideration of smokestack emissions when calculating which power plants are sustainable. And in legislation that otherwise slashes energy spending, the biofuels giveaway would cost U.S. taxpayers an extra $45 billion.
The European Union specifically excludes the use of crop-based fuels for aviation because its land-use effects are so devastating.
But such is the power of U.S. agricultural interests, which are increasingly worried that electric vehicles will crush demand for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel on the road and have been furiously lobbying Washington to create new demand in the sky. In case there was any confusion about the purpose of the biofuels provision, it’s not in the energy policy section of the Big Beautiful Bill: It’s in the section that claims to “Make Rural America Grow Again.”
The political twist is that it’s not just a Republican provision. While the overall bill has no Democratic supporters, and even some Republicans have objected to its assault on other energy subsidies, the biofuels carve-out has strong backing from farm-friendly Democrats, who created the original tax credit for SAFs in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. There’s always been broad bipartisan support for the federal mandate requiring corn ethanol to be blended into gasoline, and even though the overall Big Beautiful Bill aims to dismantle Biden’s climate policies and extend Trump’s tax cuts, its biofuels language was lifted from a bipartisan “Farm to Fly” bill explicitly designed to get ethanol to qualify for SAF credits of up to $1.75 a gallon.
“It’s shocking but it’s not surprising,” says Dan Lashof, a climate scientist and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. “Agriculture has an extremely well-oiled lobbying machine. So even as Congress guts all these things that reduce emissions to save money, they get Congress to spend lots of money to expand the one thing that increases emissions.”
Speaker Mike Johnson speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol after the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, May 22.
Francis Chung / Politico via AP Images
The impacts on the global landscape could be dramatic. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that producing about 10 percent of U.S. jet fuel from SAF by 2030 — an explicit Biden Administration goal — would require about half the U.S. soybean crop, occupying enough farmland to cover the state of Nebraska. Princeton senior research scholar Tim Searchinger has calculated that using vegetable oils like soybean for one fourth of global aviation fuel would require 40 percent of global cropland, an area twice the size of India. Flying a plane with corn ethanol would be particularly inefficient; it takes 1.7 gallons of ethanol to make a gallon of jet fuel, and producing ethanol uses almost as much fossil fuel as ethanol replaces.
The world is already losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds, most of it to agricultural expansion, and heightened demand for feedstocks like corn, soy, canola, and palm could overrun vast swaths of forests and undeveloped land, releasing its sequestered carbon and eliminating its ability to absorb atmospheric carbon in the future. The European Union specifically excludes the use of crop-based fuels for aviation because the land-use effects are so devastating, but even when Biden was still president, the U.S. farm lobby was fighting to make sure that didn’t happen here.
Currently, most of the world’s aviation fuel classified as sustainable is recycled cooking oil that’s genuinely climate-friendly.
At one Biden cabinet meeting in 2023, agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack handed treasury secretary Janet Yellen a one-page briefing document, flagging it as a high-priority issue. Yellen’s high-priority issues usually involved inflation, threats of recession, and global economic crises, so she was perplexed to read a page of acronym-laden biofuels-industry talking points about the methodological superiority of the GREET computer model over the CORSIA model for calculating carbon emissions from ILUC.
“Can someone tell me what this is about?” she later asked her top aides.
It was about billions of dollars, because the CORSIA model put enough emphasis on “indirect land-use change,” known as ILUC, to make crop-based aviation fuels ineligible for tax credits, while the farm-friendly GREET model downplayed ILUC enough to give corn and soybeans a chance to look sustainable. The stakes of this purportedly technical debate were so high that Biden climate czar John Podesta led a boringly named Sustainable Aviation Fuel Lifecycle Analysis Interagency Working Group to hash it out.
As I recount in my forthcoming book We Are Eating the Earth, the working group held weekly meetings that were clearly less about improving climate analytics than justifying the creation of a lucrative new market for farmers. “Nobody talked about the elephant in the room,” one administration official recalled. “It was theater of the absurd.”
The GREET modeling implied that all of Iowa’s corn production could be converted to ethanol while inducing virtually no farmers anywhere on Earth to expand their fields to grow more grain, but the results didn’t have to make sense when Biden was declaring at an Iowa ethanol plant that “we want to see facilities like this all over the Midwest.”
In 2024, the Biden administration agreed to use GREET — and since even GREET didn’t make ethanol look quite climate-friendly enough to qualify for credits, Vilsack secured several additional conditions that made the model even more favorable for farm-grown fuels. He barely even pretended the decision was driven by science in his public statement, hailing it as “a great beginning as we develop new markets for… home-grown agricultural crops.” The initial U.S. biofuels mandate for cars, in 2007, unleashed a torrent of deforestation in the Amazon, but Nikita Pavlenko, director of fuels and aviation for the International Coalition for Clean Transportation, says the farm lobby’s influence in Washington helped persuade the White House to ignore fears of a reprise. “We spent two years wrangling,” he says, “and in the end everyone who wanted to take land-use change seriously got steamrolled.”
It’s hard to imagine politicians bucking the powerful agriculture lobby over the proper way to assess indirect land-use change.
Today, only 0.3 percent of the world’s aviation fuel is classified as sustainable: Most of it is recycled cooking oil that’s genuinely climate-friendly because it doesn’t use farmland or spur deforestation. United Airlines has an ad campaign touting its commitment to making SAF from waste instead of crop-grown feedstock, featuring Oscar the Grouch as its “Chief Trash Officer.” Environmentalists also hope to see planes fly on “green hydrogen” produced with clean energy; pongamia oil made from the seed of a climate-friendly tropical tree; and electricity, at least for short-haul flights.
But for the airlines, the most scalable alternative fuel opportunity would be subsidized crop-based fuels, which is why they have joined farm interests to push the current Congress to extend the SAF credit and make it even easier for farm-grown SAF to qualify. The Biden team had already diminished the role of indirect land-use change in its emissions analyses — the critics say its ILUC value should have been at least five times higher, and perhaps 40 times higher — and the U.S. has already built enough biorefineries since 2021 to increase its production capacity for crop-based SAF sixfold. Still, the industry lobbyists wanted to make sure that ILUC would pose no threat whatsoever to fuels brewed from crops, and they got what they wanted on page 208 of the Big Beautiful Bill: “the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions shall be adjusted as necessary to exclude any emissions attributed to indirect land-use change.”
This is like Congress dictating that financial regulators can’t look at how much banks owe their creditors when determining whether they’re solvent; one environmentalist compared the provision to a legislative decree that pi equals nine.
A technician fills Virgin Atlantic plane with biofuel before a demonstration flight last year.
Virgin Atlantic
“There’s a lot of hype about how this kind of legislation can jumpstart SAF and make a lot of money for farmers, and I think that’s right,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, who runs the Breakthrough Institute’s food and agriculture program. “I just don’t think that’s good.”
Abraham Lincoln liked to tell a riddle: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? His answer was four: A tail is still a tail, even if you call it a leg. And using farmland to grow fuel still induces the expansion of farmland elsewhere to grow more food, even if emissions analysts aren’t allowed to acknowledge those indirect land-use changes. The brazen ban on even evaluating indirect land-use change could create problems for airlines that want to sell carbon credits for using alternative fuels, since a Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, funded by Jeff Bezos, is working with environmental groups to make sure the credits are scientifically credible. But it’s not clear how much buyers like Microsoft and Meta really care about scientific credibility.
In any case, the biofuels lobby tends to get its way in Washington. The Biden administration issued an “emergency waiver” to get more ethanol blended into gasoline last summer, and the Trump administration plans to issue the same waiver this summer. The first specific item the Trump White House mentioned in a May 8 press release hailing its preliminary trade deal with the U.K. was increased access for U.S. ethanol, with celebratory quotes from the U.S. Grains Council, the Renewable Fuels Association, and the National Corn Growers Association. Those groups have a lot of influence, and it’s hard to imagine politicians bucking them over the proper way to assess indirect land-use change in life-cycle analyses.
“It’s hard to build a constituency for addressing an issue that seems so technical,” Lashof says. “And even if we could, it’s even harder to fight the farm lobby.”
