Half the diesel fuel in California is made not from unsustainable petroleum but from renewable biomass such as waste and plant oils. Soon all our diesel will be biofuels. This is particularly good for the environment if the fuel is made from wastes and residues, but it’s much less so if it’s made from crops that use energy and land but don’t produce food.

Unfortunately, a proposed amendment to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard threatens to put the state, the country and the world on a course toward relying more heavily on diesel produced from crops, ensuring more widespread destruction of rainforests and diversion of farmland from food to energy production.

California pioneered the standard to support the development and use of lower-carbon fuels for transportation. It effectively encourages oil companies to subsidize low-carbon fuels and electric vehicles without bankrupting them, and the only costs to taxpayers are administrative. This innovative policy has been replicated in Oregon, Washington and Canada, while other states and Congress are considering comparable measures.

The fuel standard incentivizes the use of renewable diesel made from oil waste and crops, a major success of the policy. Renewable diesel can be used in virtually any diesel engine, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 70% or more when it’s made from waste oils.

The environmental benefits are much less substantial, however, when the fuel is made from crop-based oils such as soybean or canola.

That’s because those crops require energy, fertilizer and land, among other environmental consequences.

Renewable diesel offers such a compelling business opportunity to oil companies that two Bay Area refineries are being converted to produce it, possibly by the end of this year. California-inspired renewable diesel is booming across the country.

As the industry grows, however, it’s having some unintended consequences.

Until recently, most renewable diesel was made from waste cooking oil, rendered beef fat and corn-ethanol byproducts. But now those domestic sources of waste oil are largely tapped out. Indeed, the U.S. has to import not only waste-based fuels but also the wastes and residues themselves to supply our processors.

That means more and more renewable diesel is likely to come from oil produced from soybeans and other food crops.

We know from experience that increasing demand for plant-based oils — whether for food, animal feed or biofuels — leads to more slashing and burning of tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia and South America to expand palm and soy oil production. This deforestation releases mass quantities of greenhouse gases by burning trees that have sequestered carbon over centuries. It also harms watersheds, disrupts Indigenous communities and causes a raft of other social and environmental problems.

If what happened in California stayed in California, we wouldn’t be so concerned. Global vegetable oil producers probably could replace California’s remaining fossil-fuel-based diesel without much additional harm.

But other jurisdictions that have adopted or are considering policies like California’s are watching the state carefully. And the Treasury Department, European Union and global airlines are about to embrace plant oils as a substitute for the fossil fuels used in aviation. What California decides about renewable diesel will therefore have far-reaching effects.

The California Air Resources Board is updating the Low Carbon Fuel Standard this year to raise its targets and make other adjustments, including expanding its scope to include jet planes operating within the state. It is not, however, proposing to rein in the use of crop-based fuels. If the board does not address this issue, it could spur extensive conversion of tropical forests and food production to energy generation.

So what should be done? We have two ideas.

The first is to update the fuel standard’s almost 10-year-old estimate of the greenhouse gas impact of increased crop production. There is considerable evidence that the current estimate greatly understates actual emissions. Crops such as soybeans would become less attractive for renewable diesel production if the standard were corrected.

It’s an elegant and seemingly simple adjustment. The problem is that there is no scientifically established method for making an estimate, even after extensive study. Picking a new number risks interminable debate and lawsuits by the oil industry and other threatened interests.

We lean toward a second idea, which is to cap the use of crops to produce fuels. Most environmental groups favor this approach, and the California Air Resources Board has considered it. But while it’s a straightforward concept, it would be complicated to implement and would have to be updated frequently to provide flexibility to companies as conditions change.

Whatever approach regulators take, they should do it quickly, before the rapid growth of renewable diesel has irreversible repercussions. Inaction risks sending one of California’s key climate policies off course in ways that will reverberate around the world.

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Colin Murphy is the deputy director of the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy, where he co-leads the Low Carbon Fuel Policy Research Initiative. Daniel Sperling is a professor of engineering and environmental science and policy at UC Davis and a former member of the California Air Resources Board. They wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

Edward Lotterman

Haiti, the Caribbean country with a tragic history that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, between Cuba and Puerto Rico, has become a failed state in the truest sense of the word.

Government has all but collapsed. Feuding criminal gangs vie for control. The value of output, already low, is falling and health and nutrition, already bad, are worsening.

With the eyes of the world focused on acute geopolitical dangers in Ukraine and the Middle East, there has been passing attention paid to an island country with a population of 11 million, who are overwhelmingly Black. Understandable but tragic.

Haiti’s travails eventually may affect our nation slightly, but with the closest sea distance to Florida six times greater than that from Cuba, there is little chance of a small-craft armada like the 1980 Mariel boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans to our country. The Biden administration, already tarred as having failed on immigration, studiously avoids the issue.

But going beyond the immediate foreign policy challenge, it might be good to start paying attention. Why? Because Haiti’s situation forces us to think about age-old economic questions to which we still have no clear answers: Why are some nations almost inherently more productive and prosperous than others? Why do some have more successful governments? Why do some have societies that are more cohesive and just than others?

Why, for example, is Uruguay both more prosperous, more stable politically and with better social indicators of health, nutrition and education than its otherwise similar neighbor Argentina just across an estuary? Why did 19th century Japan take off economically when no other Asian country did? Why did the republics of the Netherlands and the city-state of Geneva have such dynamic economies and intellectual ferment in the 1700s, while France, Spain and other monarchies stagnated?

And at a different level, why do Oregon and Minnesota, for example, consistently best Alabama and Mississippi in every economic and social indicator?

Sometimes we can get “new ideas from dead economists,” in a phrase Todd Buchholz used as a title for his excellent introduction to economic thought.

Eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith knew a little about Haiti, but his ideas sift through factors that explain its situation — vis-à-vis even its more prosperous neighbor, the Dominican Republic. A man-made line geographically divides the island. But a world divides their economies.

One may not always agree with Smith’s conclusions, but his questions and insights remain invaluable to both curious and influential minds.

In his best-known 1776 book, “An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” Smith argued that prevailing beliefs in his day in having government take large roles in economic activity were not just wrong, but strongly counter-productive. And he railed against remaining elements of the medieval guild system that sharply limited who could do what in professions and skilled trades.

However, perhaps more importantly but less well known, Smith had written an earlier relevant book. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith examined how and why people, motivated in great part by self-interest, still develop empathy, a concern for others, a willingness to cooperate with others, and how this trait contributes to effective and just societies.

So one might ask what sorts of policies Haiti has followed? What sort of social ethos has developed there? And how would Smith explain this?

Generally through history, regardless of laws that remain nominally in effect, Haiti has been a kleptocracy, a political and economic system based on theft by controlling individuals or groups.

While Christopher Columbus never actually got to any of our 50 states, he landed on Hispaniola on his very first voyage. Within a few decades, virtually all of the native population died of violence, disease and brutal slavery.

Spain retained a colonial government on most of the island, with the French eventually gaining the western section, what is now Haiti. Both were repopulated by slaves violently brought from Africa by English merchants, who financed the slave ships that handled the largest part of the trade. This brought enormous wealth to Britain during Smith’s life, something he notes, but does not really examine.

Slave labor for sugar cane production in Haiti was probably the most brutal and deadly in any slave nation. There were numerous slave revolts in the 1700s, all put down with extreme cruelty and savagery. One in the 1790s eventually led to the nation’s independence in 1804.

However, France still had clout to force the Haitians pay reparations to France for property taken — including themselves as former chattel. The initial payment was five times the country’s annual budget, so interest accrued. In the 1920s, what is now Citibank took over the Haitian promissory note from France and collected payments until 1947.

Adding yet another factor of U.S. involvement, in addition to our commercial interests always having influence in Haiti’s economy and government, we sent Marines to occupy the whole country in 1914. They stayed until 1931. So Haiti was a de facto U.S. colony for nearly two decades. Moreover, after leaving, we manipulated who had power and oversaw the ascension of Francois Duvalier, who ran a brutal dictatorship for 31 years.

So U.S. hands are covered with Haitian blood. We were part of the process by which that country became dominated by a French-speaking economic and political elite that extracted wealth at the expense of the Creole-speaking masses.

De facto economic institutions and policies in Haiti have left little to market forces. Outright corruption and a bureaucratic system of licenses and permits dominate resource allocation — similar to the merchant guild system that Smith denounced. The judicial system is corrupt. Government fails to deliver even basic services.

All this tragic history means that Smith’s “moral sentiments” never had an opportunity to prosper in Haiti as they had in 1700s Amsterdam and Geneva. Nor have the “mediating structures” that sociologist Peter Berger and theologian Richard Neuhaus saw as vital to society gained a footing. All of these traits, when generally adopted by a population, become “values,” in that they bring value to a society and an economy.

Will they ever in Haiti? The U.S. occupation a century ago gave Haiti roads, water and sewer systems along with schools and clinic buildings. But it also cemented the power of the elites and established a brutal dictatorship. U.S. peacekeepers sent in 2004 restored order and made room for some political reform, but a massive earthquake in 2010 and hurricane in 2016 were harsh blows.

So Smith gave us some reference points into the knotty issues of failing governments and economies as do many more recent scholars including not only Berger but Robert Putnam on “social capital.” Robert Axelrod’s insights on “the evolution of cooperation” deals with issues parallel to Smith’s moral sentiments.

And what does this say about us? With rampant road rage, random shootings, customers throwing hot coffee back in the faces of food servers, obstreperous passengers in airplanes, brawling melees at amusement parks, malls and on cruise ships, one may wonder whether our own moral sentiments are dying, our mediating structures collapsing and our social capital melting away. Perhaps they are. We are more bitterly divided now than we have been for more than a century. Haiti offers us a lesson both about the underlying reasons, and the consequences.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.