Yes, obviously AI is emitting way too much. It shouldn’t even be producing 0.2% of global emissions, let alone 2%. My main grievance is that no one ever talks about improving industrial and agricultural processes even though they produce around 29% of emissions and 20% of emissions respectively.
Those percentages don’t really add up to 100, though.
Something like 40% of American corn is used as a feedstock into ethanol fuel production. But that just strips out most of the starches and carbohydrates for fermentation into alcohol. The remaining proteins and fats are used mostly for animal feed. And somewhat surprisingly, the captured CO2 is sold as an industrial CO2 product, such as dry ice. So for that 40% of corn, we could say it’s used for ethanol production. Or we could say it’s used for animal feed. Or other processes. But it’s really all of the above.
Modern American corn and soybean farming is just basically efficiently producing a bunch of bio feedstock into whatever processes can make use of those products, whether for human food, animal feed, industrial processes, etc.
Good point, however how much of feed agriculture does this sort of “feed from secondary products” make? It definitely helps that they produce multiple products from a single type of feed. Would also like to know if a person exchanges a part of their animal product diet with plant, does this actually reduce required farm land (after all then you need to produce more vegetables for the said person).
According to this analysis (probably a biased/motivated source but not one worth lying about actual output for its members to make economic planning around), each bushel produces 2.9 gallons of ethanol, 14.5 lbs of distillers’ grain, and 0.9 lbs of corn oil.
Distillers grain is a pretty useful animal feed, with about the same amount of calories, and a higher protein content, than regular corn per pound.
So if a 54 lb bushel of corn that has been used for ethanol production still has about 14-20 lbs of grain equivalent (depending on how important that higher protein content is for the animals being fed), then some percentage of that corn being used for ethanol should still be counted towards animal feed. Depending on how you want to account for the oil, too, there’s probably some feed value there, too.