ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Orthogonal relay system for efficient CO-to-ethanol electrosynthesis.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Liquid Biofuels for Transportation: Lessons of the Last Two Decades for the Next Two.Environmental science & technology · 2026Review
- Quantifying the land-use change due to soybean-based biodiesel in the United States.Applied economic perspectives and policy · 2026Article
- Harnessing plant agriculture to mitigate climate change: A framework to evaluate synthetic biology (and other) interventions.Plant physiology · 2025Article
- Microbial consortia for the conversion of biomass into fuels and chemicals.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Fast growth and high-titer bioproduction from renewable formate via metal-dependent formate dehydrogenase in Escherichia coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Scaled CO Electroreduction to Alcohols.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Soil erosion and lateral carbon fluxes from corn stover-derived biofuel.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ecologically informed solar enables a sustainable energy transition in US croplands.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Interactions Between Climate Mean and Variability Drive Future Agroecosystem Vulnerability.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Fungal impacts on Earth's ecosystems.Nature · 2025Review
- Catalysts for electrochemical CONpj materials sustainability · 2025Review
- New York State Climate Impacts Assessment Chapter 03: Agriculture.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024Article
- Driving Sustainability in the United States: Efficacy of State-Level Biodiesel Policy Approaches.Environmental science & technology · 2024Article
- Nitrogen management during decarbonization.Nature reviews. Earth & environment · 2024Article
- Estimated attribution of the RFS Program on soybean biodiesel in the U.S. using the Bioenergy Scenario Model.Energy policy · 2024Article
- Uneven consequences of global climate mitigation pathways on regional water quality in the 21st century.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- US climate policy yields water quality cobenefits in the Mississippi Basin and Gulf of Mexico.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) specifies the use of biofuels in the United States and thereby guides nearly half of all global biofuel production, yet outcomes of this keystone climate and environmental regulation remain unclear. Here we combine econometric analyses, land use observations, and biophysical models to estimate the realized effects of the RFS in aggregate and down to the scale of individual agricultural fields across the United States. We find that the RFS increased corn prices by 30% and the prices of other crops by 20%, which, in turn, expanded US corn cultivation by 2.8 Mha (8.7%) and total cropland by 2.1 Mha (2.4%) in the years following policy enactment (2008 to 2016). These changes increased annual nationwide fertilizer use by 3 to 8%, increased water quality degradants by 3 to 5%, and caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher. These tradeoffs must be weighed alongside the benefits of biofuels as decision-makers consider the future of renewable energy policies and the potential for fuels like corn ethanol to meet climate mitigation goals.
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