Bioenergy is a Climate Problem We Can Only Solve Together

In Washington, D.C. and state capitals across the U.S., three powerful fuel industries have spent the last decades lobbying for versions of the same demand: require or subsidize sales of bio-based fuels. Corn and soy growers want ethanol and bio-based diesel mandates. Timberland owners and pellet manufacturers want tax credits and price supports for wood-fired electricity. Industrial feedlot and dairy operators want above-market payments for the methane gas their livestock produce.  

This lobbying has paid off in the form of mandates in the Renewable Fuel Standard, subsidies in the Rural Energy for America Program, incentives in California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and countless other subsidies, incentives, credits, and mandates scattered across federal and state programs. The industries benefit, but communities, consumers, taxpayers, and the climate pay the price. 

These three industries win over public and government support through claims that their bio-energy source is cheaper, clean, and a solution for our climate than other energy sources. The truth, however, is the opposite: whole wood and pellet biomass, manure biogas, and crop-based biofuels are dirty, expensive, and only harm our climate, environment, and communities. 

Today, advocates for truly clean renewable energy, forest protections, and clean communities are fighting these industries in their own separate silos. But while the debates about these three bio-energy sources occur in different contexts – forest management, meat production, or transportation fuels – they are largely the same. And if advocates recognize the commonalities in these fights, we can come together to help end wasteful subsidies, support healthier and more sustainable farming systems, accelerate truly clean energy and net-zero technologies, and hold corporate polluters accountable across the supply chain. 

The Bioenergy Playbook 

The industry’s success relies on a deceptively simple equation: “renewable” = “green.” The pitch is compelling because it begins with a genuine fact: carbon in trees, corn, and cow manure originally came from the atmosphere. And it’s logical to think: burn that material, and you’re just returning carbon to where it came from—making it carbon-neutral. What’s hidden is everything else—the land cleared, water consumed, chemicals applied, emissions from processing and transport, and the opportunity cost of using land for truly efficient renewable energy instead. 

Each industry relies on the same playbook of accounting tricks to hide the real climate impacts:  

• For wood pellets, the “carbon debt” from logging – the impact of burning all the carbon in the wood – can take decades to repay through regrowth. And even then, the regrowth never fully catches up. The energy used to harvest timber and manufacture pellets produces carbon. Soil erosion releases more. And some forests don’t regrow at all. The math doesn’t work. 

• Growing corn and soy for biofuels releases high levels of greenhouse gases—especially from fertilizer manufacture and use. Using tens of millions of acres for fuel also pushes food production onto forests and grasslands, releasing the carbon they stored. Studies show the result: these biofuels are worse for the climate than gasoline.  

• Manure digesters used to produce biogas have a fundamental flaw. They capture a methane from manure pits, but they miss the significant amounts of methane belched by cattle. The issues don’t stop there: digesters regularly leak, and they create a powerful incentive for animal feeding operations to manage their manure to generate extra methane so they can get more subsidies. The system rewards unnecessary emissions.  

Bad Economics and Bad for Communities 

The math doesn’t just fail on emissions—it fails on economics. Biomass electricity needs government mandates and subsidies. Biofuels cost more than gasoline—and the EPA itself estimates the biofuel mandate will increase food and fuel costs by almost $10 billion per year. Manure digesters are the worst deal: they cost roughly ten times what the natural gas they produce is worth. The industry is government-dependent, not market-driven. 

Landowner and agribusiness lobbies sell these programs to legislators on the promise of rural jobs. But that claim does not hold for any of these energy forms. Wood pellet plants create fewer and more hazardous jobs than often claimed; ethanol production has created few jobs, and those at a high cost; biogas production depends on infrastructure and generates few jobs. 

The bioenergy industries benefit from government subsidies and mandates, but the costs fall on everyone else. Communities suffer from air and water pollutants, leading to severe impacts on health and quality of life.  

• In addition to the erosion and water pollution from timber harvesting, wood pellet production is severely polluting, harming communities, and largely unregulated. Near Gloster, Mississippi, a wood pellet plant exceeded its permitted pollution limit by three to four times while underreporting its true emissions by more than 25-fold.  

• Ethanol refineries emit significantly greater amounts of certain hazardous air pollutants than oil refineries do. In Iowa and Illinois, ethanol plants account for roughly 70% of all reported hazardous air pollution, while corn production is fouling drinking water supplies.  

• Communities near manure digesters and the feedlots that feed them, from California’s San Joaquin Valley to the rural South, suffer extreme air and water pollution, that is ignored by regulators. 

And all of these bioenergy sources are devastating for wildlife and biodiversity, driving the conversion of native lands to crops, accelerating unsustainable logging, and polluting the clean water and ecosystems that wildlife needs. 

Together For Better Solutions 

Bioenergy is a climate problem hiding behind the guise of ‘renewable energy,’ but we have far better clean energy solutions that actually work for our climate, land, and communities. 

Solar and wind power can produce gas and electricity far less expensively than manure biogas or wood pellet electricity. A hectare of solar panels charging electric vehicles delivers roughly 200 to 300 times as much mobility as a hectare of corn grown for ethanol. Even a conservative estimate still finds solar roughly 70 times more land-efficient than growing crops for biofuels, with none of the toxic pollution. Proven manure management techniques will reduce the methane generated and eliminate the need to capture it.  

The farmland, woodland, and feedlot interests don’t coordinate with each other. They don’t need to. They’re running the same “renewable is green” playbook three times over, and they win because advocates are tackling each fight alone. They turn public subsidies into private land value, while our climate, environment, health, and quality of life suffer.  

Here’s what breaks the cycle: Recognizing it’s one fight, not three. With a unified voice, we can call for the government to strip mandates and subsidies. Let these industries operate on their real merits—or lack thereof. Without that government guarantee, the industry pressure driving all three will reveal that this never had much to do with clean energy, but everything to do with land values and income.