Trump's biofuel push sparks debate over farms, forests and emissions

President Donald Trump stood on the Truman Balcony at the White House during the 'Great American Agriculture Celebration' last week and announced what he called a 'historic' boost to the nation's farmers.

The Environmental Protection Agency, Trump said, would require the highest-ever volume of crop-based biofuels to be blended into the nation's gasoline supply, a move the administration promises will bring jobs and cashflow to an agriculture industry feeling the twin punches of the president's tariffs and higher fertilizer prices linked to the war in Iran. Trump called himself a 'true friend and champion' of the country's farmers, a key political constituency that he is again actively and festively courting.

But some analysts and researchers say the administration's plan has a critical flaw: The U.S. doesn't produce enough vegetable oil to satisfy the demands of the new blending targets. That means it will have to import more foreign vegetable oil, which will imperil climate-critical tropical forests thousands of miles away as they're cleared to grow more oil crops.

Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says that bio-based diesel consumption in the U.S. has shot up in recent years. Imported vegetable oils and animal fats met about 70 percent of that demand.

The EPA set the biofuels volumes for 2026 and 2027 at about 27 billion gallons, with 15 billion from corn-based ethanol-the same amount as in previous years. But the new mandate calls for a 60 percent increase in biomass-based diesel, including vegetable-based and renewable diesel, over 2025, or about 9 billion gallons.

'That 60 percent increase is massive,' Martin said. 'That's going to be a huge shock to the U.S. and global markets for vegetable oil and fat.'

Martin pointed to recent research from Aaron Smith at the University of California, Berkeley, showing that global demand for biomass-based diesel between 2002 and 2018 drove deforestation across more than 4 million acres in Southeast Asia, releasing more than one gigaton of carbon dioxide. That conversion means biomass-based diesel actually has higher carbon emissions than fossil-fuel-based diesel.

'Increasing the use of vegetable oil for fuel has dramatic consequences for deforestation,' Martin said. 'There's not 60 percent more vegetable oil available in the United States for fuel, so if it's going to increase that much, it's going to have a dramatic impact on the balance of trade and that will lead the U.S. to import more vegetable oil.'

The world's vegetable oil markets are highly interlinked. If vegetable oil is diverted from food to fuel uses, oil for food will have to come from somewhere else, potentially regions where carbon-rich tropical forests are cleared to produce soybeans and palm oil.