Fracking is better for the environment than biofuels

Washington Examiner:

In 2007, at the urging of President George W. Bush, Democrats and Republicans together created a massive new mandate for the production and sale of biofuels. It was environmental folly.

The public is familiar with that part of the renewable fuel mandate about ethanol, the politically favored, wasteful, and environmentally destructive product that is blended into gasoline thanks to federal law. But the biodiesel side of this business is less well-known.

It has, though, produced an environmental catastrophe in East Asia, the defilement of tens of millions of acres of rainforest, and increased net carbon emissions, the New York Times reported this week.

The 2007 measure stimulated worldwide manufacture of vegetable oils for biodiesel because it created huge new and artificial demand for soy oil and then palm oil, which is even cheaper. These crops required farmland in suitable climates, which meant tens of millions of acres of jungle in Malaysia and Indonesia were destroyed to make room for unnecessary farming. Worse still is the fact that this destruction is defeating its own original rationale.

The theory behind biodiesel as a carbon-neutral source of energy is that the plants grown to produce it draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere before returning it when burned as fuel. But artificial demand for palm farming has, and the associated clearance of old-growth rainforest means the supposedly green fuel is not carbon neutral at all.

The Times cites NASA researchers claiming that “accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions” in 2,000 years. Indonesia has now become “the world’s fourth-largest source of [carbon] emissions” as a result.
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Here's an irony, though. While supposedly green, virtue-signaling biofuels are inflicting harm on the environment, and fracking, that supposedly demonic, poisonous, planet-dooming technology for cheap extraction of abundant fossil fuel is helping repair the damage.

By bringing natural gas out of the earth in massive quantities, fracking has lowered its price and helped America’s utility industry cut the use of coal dramatically. Natural gas has gone from something people only used to cook food and heat their homes to the nation’s leading fuel for electrical generation.

This has made us the world leader in carbon emissions reduction for nine of the 18 years so far in this century. At the moment, America has reduced its carbon emissions more than any of the remaining signatories of the Paris climate accords. And unlike France, we've done it without measures that prompt enraged citizens to riot.
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Biofuels are both inefficient and destructive.  They also inflict damage on equipment that uses them especially small engines like yard tools and outboard motors.  They only survive because they are a boondoggle for the agribusiness market.   I go out of my way and pay extra to buy non-ethanol gas for my chainsaws and other small engines after maying hundreds more to repair the damage done by ethanol.