WASHINGTON / US, 22 July 2025: In the spring of 2003, from his desk in a Washington, D.C. office overlooking the site of a presidential assassination attempt, a lawyer named Tim Searchinger was wrestling with a puzzle.
He was not a scientist, nor an economist, but a wetlands advocate for the Environmental Defense Fund. The document before him was a dense technical paper from the esteemed Argonne National Laboratory, and something about its conclusions felt profoundly wrong. This nagging intuition would set him on a path that would not only redefine his career but also force a global re-evaluation of the intricate links between food, farming, land use, and climate change.
The paper in question analysed the greenhouse gas emissions of corn ethanol versus gasoline, a niche topic at the time. Its conclusion was that fuelling cars with corn ethanol resulted in a modest but significant 20% reduction in emissions. The finding was produced using the state-of-the-art GREET model, a pioneering "life-cycle analysis" tool.
For most, this would have been a satisfactory, even welcome, result. But Mr. Searchinger was wired to question consensus. His professional life was a testament to his belief that truth was often buried in the fine print and that sophisticated models could be masterfully manipulated to serve a convenient conclusion.
His suspicion was born from experience. A core part of his work involved exposing how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers often distorted cost-benefit analyses to justify environmentally destructive water projects. He had learned to see through complex calculations, understanding that "garbage in plus garbage assumptions could produce garbage out." Reading the Argonne study, he had the same feeling of unease.
The study's core logic seemed simple: burning fossil fuels like gasoline releases ancient carbon into the atmosphere, while burning biofuels from corn merely recycles carbon that the plants had recently absorbed through photosynthesis.
Thus, a 'renewable' fuel was inherently cleaner. However, when Searchinger scrutinised the data, he found a contradiction. The process of growing corn and refining it into ethanol was far more carbon-intensive than drilling for oil and refining gasoline. If the industrial process for ethanol was dirtier, how could the final product be cleaner?
The answer lay in the carbon absorbed by the corn plant itself. The model credited this absorption to the fuel's life cycle, tipping the scales in ethanol's favour. Here, Searchinger stumbled upon a simple but profound flaw in the logic. A corn plant, he reasoned, absorbs the same amount of carbon whether it is destined for a food plate or a fuel tank.
Why, he wondered, would growing corn for fuel be any more beneficial for the climate than growing the exact same corn for food and then burning an equivalent amount of gasoline? The carbon balance in the field and from the car's tailpipe remained the same. The only difference was the higher emissions from producing the ethanol itself.
This led him back to his original concern, which had little to do with climate change. As a wetlands advocate, he saw agriculture as the primary threat to the ecosystems he fought to protect.
He worried that a government-mandated boom in ethanol would create a massive new market for corn, incentivising farmers to drain the Midwest’s few remaining swamps and prairies to create more cropland. He envisioned the region's diverse 'temperate-zone Serengeti' being paved over by an uninterrupted cornfield.
If vast quantities of corn were diverted from food to fuel, he posited, that lost food would have to be grown somewhere. This would inevitably mean converting more natural land—forests, wetlands, or grasslands—into farms, a process with its own uncounted environmental and climate consequences. He had a growing hunch that the world's top scientists had missed this crucial, indirect effect.
However, the political climate in Washington was not conducive to such nuanced arguments. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and during the war in Iraq, the primary political currency was 'energy independence'. Biofuels were sold as a patriotic solution that would reduce reliance on Middle Eastern oil while funnelling government support to Midwestern farmers. Climate change was a peripheral issue; the U.S. Senate had unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol years earlier.
The push for an ethanol mandate, the 'Renewable Fuels Standard,' was backed by a formidable political coalition. At its head was 'Big Agriculture,' a lobby with deep roots and outsized influence. Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which owned half of the nation's ethanol plants, was a legendary force in Washington.
The industry was already propped up by a raft of subsidies and tax breaks, and its political allies were powerful and bipartisan, including Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert. The quadrennial tradition of presidential candidates pandering to the corn lobby before the Iowa caucus was so ingrained it had been satirized on the television show The West Wing.
Searchinger’s attempts to lobby against the mandate were futile. He argued that it was a tax on consumers to subsidise out-of-state agribusinesses, but even politicians from corn-free states were unwilling to oppose the lobby. An aide to a New Jersey senator candidly admitted his boss could not risk alienating Iowa, because, like all ambitious politicians, he might one day run for president.
Discouraged, Searchinger moved on. The cause felt lost, the political forces too powerful. He described himself as the "patron saint of almost-lost causes," a happy warrior fighting uphill battles to protect nature from the relentless expansion of agriculture. But this battle felt particularly unwinnable.
In retrospect, he acknowledged how much he failed to grasp in 2003. He was unaware of the immense climate benefits of the very wetlands he was fighting to save. He knew little about international agriculture and how a fuel mandate in America could trigger deforestation in the Amazon or food shortages in Africa. The full scope of the problem—that humanity was running out of land to meet its competing demands for food, fuel, and nature—had not yet dawned on him. But then, it hadn't dawned on anyone else either.
His initial, aborted investigation was not a failure but a gestation. The questions he asked, born from a lawyer's attention to detail and a conservationist's love for the land, were the right ones. It took an outsider, unburdened by the assumptions of the field, to see the flaw in the consensus.
Years later, he would return to the subject, armed with a deeper understanding, and make the scientific and economic connections that the experts had missed, ultimately proving his initial hunch was devastatingly correct. His journey from a wetlands lawyer to a global authority on food and climate was an odd plot twist, but one that began with a simple, persistent question about a single scientific paper.
Source: Lithub
Image credit: geneticliteracyproject.org
