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In Bush era gestures at green tech, we briefly got excited about biodiesel. But in the US that meant corn, and experts got upset because corn biodiesel is negative EROI. I saw one person describe it as "a corn disposal method". In that sense, I posit Bitcoin and AI to be "compute disposal methods".

I’ve never understood this position on biodiesel. I’ve had discussions with people who insist biodiesel isn’t viable because it isn’t net positive. When I point out that oil is a limited resource and corn is basically unlimited, they just stare at me and blink.

1. Different researchers have measured EROI in different ways. But my understanding is most biodiesels are EROI+. Corn is special. Corn is fucked up. Corn is the One Bad Biodiesel and it seems to only be created for US political reasons. Growing sugarcane biodiesel in south america is Good Biodiesel

2. If you think about it, biodiesel is like solar power that you can store in liquid form. Imagine biodiesel is EROI=1 and that *all* energy consumed in the biodiesel growing process comes from a nuclear fusion plant somewhere. This makes sense. 1 unit of fusion power = 1 unit of liquid vehicle gas.

But. First off. You're not getting the power from a fusion plant, are you? The power is being spent all over the place, you've got trucks on the corn fields, you've got harvesters, you've got the plant that reduces to biodiesel. Some of that will be electric vehicles or clean energy. Some won't…