Why the ethanol “transition” will not retire itself — the short version

Thorsten Arnold — for the National Farmers Union

Before a litre of ethanol reaches Ontario’s gasoline, an entire production system was put into motion. A corn plant, farmland, farm inputs, the farmer, an ethanol plant. And investors who are profiting at each link of the chain. And above all of it sits one of the most durable political stories of the last twenty-five years: that this arrangement is temporary, and that it is needed now. Ethanol is a bridge, we are told — imperfect, and on its way out. The other side is in sight.

The bridge and its costs

The trouble is that the other side keeps moving away from us. Corn ethanol was first a bridge to cellulosic ethanol. When cellulose turned out illusive at scale, ethanol became the bridge we would need until electric cars slowly replaced the fleet. Now that electrification actually does threaten gasoline, the same plants and corn contracts are being repositioned again, this time for sustainable aviation fuel.⁸⁹ A quarter-century of bridging – the bridge seems to loop.

A thing called transitional for thirty years is not transitional. It is a permanent industrial system dressed up as a temporary one, and the costume reframes something: it reverses the burden of proof. An honest question — Is diverting farmland to fuel a good use of land, money, and climate policy right now? — gets replaced by a softer one: Can we tolerate the costs a little longer while the real solution substantiates? Present harms become “transition costs.” Criticism becomes a distraction from the climate fight. The expected future excuses the actual present.

The story survives by morphing along. Researchers studying Europe’s biofuel fights named it the dynamic policy-promise lock-in: governments defend a flawed incumbent as the launchpad for its own successor, while the support entrenches the very markets and lobbies that make the successor impossible.³ Once a government is invested in its own forecast — programs announced, models funded, careers built — conceding that the pathway was badly chosen would indict a decade of policy decisions. So the promised future becomes the defence of a disappointing present. Ethanol became too vested, too big to fail.

When the science caught up, it was about land. In 2008, Searchinger and colleagues showed what ethanol’s carbon accounting left out: divert corn from food/feed to fuel, and the displaced demand does not evaporate.⁴ Prices rise, production intensifies, and somewhere else — often thousands of kilometres away — pasture and forest and wetlands become cropland, and thye carbon stored in their soil and biomass goes up into the air. Such Indirect Land-Use Change (ILUC) has been missing from the carbon accountant’s ledgers, along with biodiversity, water, nutrients, and pesticide load. The relevant assessment boundary was never a refinery and its neighbouring farms. It is the global web of land and commodity markets, communicating through price signals, shifting adaptively. Widen the boundary that far and the carbon arithmetic of the “transition” collapses: temporary demand for fuel sets off permanent conversions of land. Switch the mandate off in 2045 and the drained peat, the ploughed prairie, the converted forests, and the lost species will not return within a human timescale.’

What is driving the ethanol system?

Here is the reasoning I hear from people I respect: electric vehicles are superior, they will replace gasoline cars, ethanol goes with the gasoline, so ethanol is dying and not worth the fight. Each link looks solid; the chain is broken all the same, because it treats ethanol demand as a fact of the fuel market when it is an artefact of political choice. Technology sets potential demand; policy turns it into actual demand; organized interests shape the policy. The governments in question have written the refutation down. Ontario’s regulation ratchets bio-based content up — to 13% in 2028 and 15% “from 2030 or any subsequent compliance period,” with no sunset.¹ And ECCC’s own reference case has ethanol rising from 3.78 to 6.03 billion litres by 2030 while gasoline falls from 43.08 to 36.28.¹⁵ The fuel shrinks; the ethanol inside it grows. That is precisely the pattern the “it will fade away” story says is impossible.

To understand ethanol’s strange immortality, stop thinking about fuel and ask what problem it solves. It has nothing to do with carbon or climate. North American agriculture runs a treadmill: yield growth outpaces demand, prices fall, each farmer sensibly produces even more, and the surplus grinds margins down again. Ethanol is a spectacular demand-manufacturing machine — the automobile can burn more corn than any population could ever eat.¹¹ It soaks up surplus and props up prices, and the environmental case was only ever the public story. Follow the money one step further: higher returns do not stay with the farmer, they capitalize into rent and land value. A 2026 study estimates the post-2005 boom lifted farmland values in high-suitability Midwestern counties by about $1,147 an acre, near 44 percent.¹³ That windfall flows to whoever holds the deed and raises the wall for everyone trying to get in. So when someone says ethanol is good for the farmer, ask: which farmer? Landowner, tenant, retiree cashing out, priced-out newcomer, processor, pension fund — the benefit migrates to the deed.

Once a society manufactures an appetite for biomass, the definition of available land swells to meet it. Recovering ecosystems — the forests and grasslands that returned to the abandoned farmland of the U.S. Northeast — get relabelled “idle,” “marginal,” “underutilized,” “untapped,” until land quietly doing climate work reads as an under-performing asset awaiting development. Ecological succession, the land healing itself, is reframed as a reversion to be prevented.¹⁷ The same move invents “waste” oils and residues whose ecological and industrial uses are counted as zero — the boundary error again.

The story and story that stabilizes the bridge

Narratives persist because they protect something. I offer this as an invitation to watch our own minds, my own included. A useful language for it is offered by Internal Family Systems, a psychological model.  It’s a way to notice how we assemble the stories we need to be true: the mind is a crowd of parts, and some are protectors that curate which evidence we let ourselves see. Several protectors are at work when a climate-committed person never sees the land under a biofuel. A protector of identity, because conceding the harm threatens the self that fights for the climate. A protector of the coalition, because criticizing your own side’s tools feels like handing ammunition to the enemy. A protector against despair, because in a perpetual emergency the belief in a smooth transition is load-bearing, and questioning a bridge feels like sawing at the rope you hang from. Much of the progressive comfort with crop-based biofuels is cognitive denial — understandable in a time of crisis, and counterproductive because grassland does not care how reasonable our reasons for not looking were.

Zoom out to the institutions and the same protection scales up. The genius of the word “transition” is that it lets incompatible interests support the identical policy while each tells a different story. A funder tolerates ethanol as a fading legacy. A climate group keeps its focus on fossil fuels and avoids a fight with farmers. A government promises reductions to one audience and rural jobs to another. A farm lobby calls it climate policy in public and a corn market in private. A land investor banks the rising rents. A portfolio fund is glad its steady land assets balance its riskier bets. Six actors, six stories, one mandate — and “transition” is the word that binds them. This is why proving ethanol’s poor climate performance has not ended it, and will not. The policy is only superficially a climate instrument; it is a market-management program with a climate justification bolted on.

How to advocate against ethanol?

The NFU need not oppose the energy transition — only demand discipline about what earns the name. No lighter scrutiny for a technology because its backers expect it to vanish: a real transition carries a legislated sunset, a defined successor, and explicit withdrawal criteria; E15 has none. Accounting must include direct and indirect land-use change, soil-carbon loss, and the displaced uses of “waste” feedstock. Governments should report the hectares behind the fuel and clear a hard land ceiling before promoting any biomass pathway. And the NFU can refuse the false choice between phasing ethanol out and protecting corn prices, because it understands what both sides talk around: you cannot strip away a market that eats a large share of the crop and call it a transition — that is an eviction. Solve the demand problem directly instead — income stabilization without perpetual growth, supply management and reserves, guardrails so public support does not capitalize into rents, and real backing for diversified agriculture, pasture, restoration, and land access. Farmers deserve fair prices. Feeding cropland to cars and jets is one of the worst ways yet devised to deliver them.

Ethanol’s most successful transition was never technological. It was narrative. Each time the evidence dismantled one justification, a new destination appeared, and the mandates, the plants, and the pressure on land stayed exactly where they were. Calling something transitional does not make its land impacts temporary, and obsolescence does not repeal a regulation. A story that lets everyone look away is not a solution — it is the most effective defence the mandate has ever had. The work is to stop reading it as a bridge and start reading it as a régime.

References

[1]  Ontario, O. Reg. 663/20 — bio-based gasoline content rising to 13% (2028) and 15% (“2030 or any subsequent compliance period”).

[3]  Berti, P. & Levidow, L. — analysis of “policy-promise lock-in” in European biofuel policy.

[4]  Searchinger, T. et al. (2008), Science — indirect land-use change and carbon debt omitted from conventional biofuel lifecycle analysis.

[8]  Energy Transitions Commission — biofuels’ transitional role, stranded-asset risk, and alcohol-to-jet pathways for ethanol plants.

[9]  The Transition Accelerator (2023), Canadian SAF (C-SAF) Roadmap — measures to “kickstart” a domestic sustainable aviation fuel industry.

[11]  USDA Economic Research Service (2007) — ethanol demand’s “unprecedented” effect on feed-grain markets.

[13]  Causal study (2026) — post-2005 ethanol boom estimated to have raised high-suitability Midwestern farmland values by ~$1,147/acre (≈44%).

[15]  Environment and Climate Change Canada reference case — ethanol rising from 3.78 to 6.03 billion litres (2024–2030) while gasoline falls from 43.08 to 36.28 billion litres.

[17]  Northeast bioenergy assessments and the USDA-funded NEWBio consortium — recovering land relabelled “marginal/abandoned”; “preventing the reversion of idle lands to scrub.”