In 2011, I scrutinized a gathering wave of biofuels for Nature, and that deep dive on making fuels from woody rather than sugary plant material remains one of my most-cited works. Perhaps because we nailed what emerged as the technology’s as-yet-insurmountable hurdle: making the conversion processes work consistently at industrial scale.

A little over a decade later Nature take another look at the sustainability of biofuels. The picture isn’t pretty, thanks in part to the failure of those cellulosic fuels.

Biofuels continue to grow in ways that overlap with food crops, contributing to agricultural expansion at the expense of carbon-storing forests and grasslands. And poorly conceived and regulated mechanisms for tracking and rewarding carbon storage by farms threaten to exacerbate the trouble.

It will take a “ground-up revamp” for agriculture to get biofuels right, both for the environment and for farm communities. As we conclude, it looks like déja vu all over again: “If the sustainability of biofuels depends on such fundamental changes, one has to wonder whether another next-generation biofuels failure isn’t the more likely outcome.”

Read the full story @Nature, or in Scientific American.