The rebound effect and the innefectiveness of BEV subsidies

Ethanol in U.S. Gas Tanks is Backfiring for Climate Change

It may have seemed apparent to members of Congress a decade ago that if a motorist pumped a gallon of fuel made from corn into their gas tank, a gallon of fossil fuel would be left in the ground — hopefully on a foreign shore. But real life is not so simple.

A team of researchers has concluded that for every three gallons of corn ethanol that’s being burned under America’s flagship renewable fuel rules, Americans will avoid burning just one gallon of gasoline made from crude...

The researchers, from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, focused their analysis on the “fuel rebound effect.” That’s economist jargon describing an unintended market consequence of rules requiring America’s gasoline industry to blend biofuels into its products.

“The fuel rebound effect is so strong, and the climate benefits of the biofuels are so small, especially for corn ethanol, that emissions increase,” said Jason Hill, an energy and sustainability researcher who led the work, published in the journal Energy Policy. “That’s a big problem...

increasing the production of an alternative fuel helps make fossil fuels cheaper, tempering the reductions in fossil fuel demand — the so-called fuel rebound effect.

After surveying more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies, the researchers assigned a broadly accepted numerical value to the fuel rebound effect. They also compared the energy content of biofuel with gasoline. Finally, for the sake of number-crunching, they assumed that overly optimistic EPA assumptions about the climate benefits of different biofuels were accurate.

Crunching those numbers led the the researchers to conclude in their paper that America’s fuel standard “actually leads to a net increase” in greenhouse gas emissions — by hundreds of millions of tons from 2006 to 2022...

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