Are you aware that by having agriculture directly integrated inro the fuel/electricity market, you have ai compete directly against people for basic survival neccssities?

They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.

Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)

90M light vehicles are sold globally every year. As long as consumers demand cars, BEVs are the most climate friendly cars to sell them. Anyone saying “don’t buy cars!” is living a pipe dream.

China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.

(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)

Ebikes might have more positive impact, but that doesn't matter unless you can convince a critical mass of people to use them instead of their cars. I say this as someone who thinks ebikes are cool, but that's absolutely not going to happen in any significant way at least in the US. Replacing a gas car with an ebike requires a significant shift in your lifestyle, which most people either can't or don't want to do. The benefit of a BEV is that you can mostly use it exactly like you use the gas car you already have, with some added benefit of being able to "refuel" it at home while you sleep. Changes that people actually adopt are at the end of the day the most impactful ones.

It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.

In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.

Except in general aviation, where lead free alternatives are just coming out of the approval pipeline.

There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.

Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.

There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).

It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.

Chinese population's 1.4B number has only been supported by the Chinese government. Many have suspected that it's now around 1.1B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM57HhM8yV8, after covid deaths and overcounting by local governments. That's why the malls in Shanghai and Beijing are completely empty at this point.

Also, the US consumer market is 4X that of China.

I've not seen any famous progressives complain loudly about China and their practices. In fact, the progressives here seem happy flagging my post decrying China.

His point is probably we'd save 99.5% of the land that is going to make bioethanol.