MinnPost: 'A rebuke of science and the promise of sustainable aviation fuel'

The following is a Community Voices piece published by MinnPost in August 2025, written by FMR Water Program Director Trevor Russell. You find find the original here.

A pyrrhic victory is a win that comes at such a great cost that it is effectively a defeat. Advocates for sustainable aviation fuel may have just earned such a victory. 

Nestled in the federal reconciliation bill was a bipartisan biofuels tax provision: It changes how we count emissions from crop-based fuels, including those used for sustainable aviation fuel — the linchpin of the airline sector’s decarbonization strategy.

At first blush, this change looks like a windfall for those invested in getting sustainable aviation fuels off the ground, including the public officials and industry leaders here in Minnesota working to position the state at the forefront of this effort. In reality, it’s a rebuke of science that undermines public trust and threatens the credibility of sustainable aviation fuel as a legitimate climate solution.

The aviation sector is considered difficult to decarbonize because, unlike ground transportation, electrification isn’t a realistic near-term option. Instead, the sector is looking to low-carbon liquid fuels made from a variety of sources, including crops like corn and soybeans. 

While sustainable aviation fuel is still fairly new, it’s expected to grow massively in the coming decades, driven by the federal government's target of producing 35 billion gallons per year by 2050. That would be enough to supply 100% of domestic air travel.

To reach this lofty goal, the federal government established a tax credit (dubbed 45Z, in reference to the relevant section of the tax code) to encourage companies to make sustainable aviation fuel. The credit is awarded based on a fuel’s carbon intensity — a calculation that takes into account the greenhouse gases emitted throughout the fuel’s entire life cycle. That’s things like the fertilizer used to grow the crops, the trains that transport them and the refineries used for processing. 

Within this calculation is a critical climate measure called “indirect land use change.” ILUC, as it’s often abbreviated, is a big deal. It is how we account for the emissions consequences of converting forests, grasslands and wetlands into cropland. If we use conventional summer crops like corn and soybeans to make billions of gallons of new fuel, it could require tens of millions of acres of farmland, displacing existing crops which then need to be grown elsewhere. 

Inevitably, this means plowing more natural land both in the U.S. and internationally — a significant environmental cost that must be accounted for in any measurement of climate impact.

But the recent change to 45Z in the reconciliation bill erases ILUC from the carbon calculation for biofuels. It’s an accounting trick with potentially grim consequences.

When producers are allowed to pretend their fuel has lower carbon emissions than it actually does, it opens sustainable fuels up to credible accusations of blatant greenwashing. The entire sustainable aviation fuel enterprise only works if consumers, suppliers, governments and the airlines themselves can count on policy that delivers real climate solutions. Without that trust, the market is destined to fail — and hurt farmers and the aviation industry in the process.

To make matters worse, this change also discourages producers from using crops that could be climate solutions. Case in point: An emerging class of very low-carbon biofuel crops called winter-hardy oilseeds. Research shows these crops hold enormous promise for improving water quality, and critically, they don’t cause indirect land use change. 

Winter-hardy oilseeds grow in the offseason, between crops like corn and soybeans, so can share acres with these summer staples. They thrive even in the Upper Great Plains, where our harsh winters have historically inhibited this sort of farming. (There were about 5,000 acres of these types of oilseeds in the ground this spring.) 

By growing during a time when soil is usually bare, winter-hardy oilseeds help prevent snowmelt and rainfall from washing topsoil, fertilizer and pesticides into our waterways. And by using land when it would otherwise be vacant, farmers have another crop to harvest and sell. 

If we prioritize aviation fuel created from these kinds of crops, we can make both flying and farming more sustainable. But these real solutions can’t compete if Congress fudges the math and ignores the climate impact of indirect land use change.

Sustainable aviation fuel has the potential to be a true climate solution, but only if it's done responsibly. That means using science to shape decisions about policy — not carving out exceptions that erode public trust.

If we scale this fuel using sustainable crops and farming practices, we can avoid wide-scale land conversion while benefiting the aviation industry, American farmers and the planet.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.