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Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels
Something felt off. Tim Searchinger lacked the proper credentials to say exactly what was off that day in the spring of 2003. He was a lawyer, not a scientist or economist. He was reading a complex…
Sitting at his cluttered desk in the Environmental Defense Fund’s sixth-floor offices in Washington, D.C., overlooking the famous back entrance to the Hilton where President Ronald Reagan was shot, he just had a sense the paper didn’t add up. Searchinger was on the prowl for science he could use to prevent that, so when he heard about the Argonne paper, in those days before studies were routinely posted online, he called the lead author, a Chinese-born environmental scientist named Michael Wang, and asked him to FedEx it. For one thing, it became clear that climate would be irrelevant to the debate over the proposed “Renewable Fuels Standard.” With America at war in Iraq, ethanol’s boosters were touting the mandate as a win-win that would reduce reliance on Middle Eastern oil while propping up demand for Midwestern corn.
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