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Why the Trump administration loves the stupidest renewable energy

America’s biofuels policy is helping destroy the world’s rainforests

The modern soybean is one of the world’s miracle technologies, capable of cheaply, efficiently, and healthfully supplying protein and other nutrients to billions of people. But, unfortunately, we’ve mostly chosen to squander it on the most destructive purposes possible.

Soy is America’s second most widely cultivated crop, occupying a land area equivalent to more than 4 percent of the continental US. That’s not (sadly) because we’ve become a nation of tofu obsessives. Rather, American soy production has expanded substantially in recent decades in part because the US government effectively mandates funneling it into fuel tanks. (The other major market for American soy, meanwhile, is feed for factory farmed animals.)

For the past 20 years, the US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has required that biofuels — fuels made from crops and other biological materials like animal waste — be mixed into the national fuel supply. In practice, it’s dominated by corn ethanol that goes into passenger car tanks, and biomass-based diesel, comprised in large part of soybean oil, used to power trucks, tractors, and buses. And last month, the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2026-2027 rules for the Renewable Fuel Standard took effect, turbocharging that system with an unprecedented, nearly 70 percent increase in the biomass-based diesel mandate, relative to the 2025 baseline.

How soybeans took over America — and the world

Ostensibly, part of the point of the Renewable Fuel Standard is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing some of our fossil fuels with renewable, less carbon-intensive ones. So it might come as a surprise that the Trump administration, which has been gleefully canceling anything having to do with green energy and climate policy, is expanding the program. But the RFS as currently designed does not benefit the climate — it actually probably harms it.

Few experts outside the powerful agrarian lobby defend the Renewable Fuel Standard in its current, crop-heavy form as sound policy anymore. It survives now mostly to guarantee a market to corn and soy growers. These are industries that President Donald Trump is particularly keen to please after angering farmers with his trade war last year and the disruptions to global trade — including fertilizer supplies — from the war........

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