He was also an agriculture guy, because farms were the main threat to the wetlands he wanted to protect. Still, barely 1 percent of America’s fuel was ethanol, and barely 1 percent of America’s corn became ethanol. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits? Searchinger would later return to ethanol and climate, making scientific and economic connections the field’s scientists and economists had missed. He would then figure out how agriculture was eating the earth, and create the first serious plan for preventing that.