Date published: 2008/02/08
The New York Times says:
Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.
The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.
These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.
The destruction of natural ecosystems - whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America - not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.
Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.
"When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially," said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. "Previously there”s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis."
These plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But even that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions - for refining and transport, for example.
The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. "So for the next 93 years you”re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions."
...
the papers published Thursday suggested that, if land use is taken into account, biofuels may not provide all the benefits once anticipated.Dr. Searchinger said the only possible exception he could see for now was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which take relatively little energy to grow and is readily refined into fuel. He added that governments should quickly turn their attention to developing biofuels that did not require cropping, such as those from agricultural waste products.
"This land use problem is not just a secondary effect - it was often just a footnote in prior papers,". "It is major. The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland."
Well, it's only two studies. And no doubt the analysis is extremely complex and lacking in various important regards. (And would one really trust any report whose lead author works for a speical interest pressure group like the Nature Conservancy? Princeton is a different matter.) But these are just the latest in a long line of studies pointing out the serious flaws in biofuels. Unfortunately the EU is still insisting on forcing biofuels into the EU energy equation, and the current US administration is following suit because it provides another, implicit rather than explicit, subsidy of their corporate friends in the agricultural industry.
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