Alright, folks, let's tear this apart and see if there's any meat on its bones. IMO, the biggest problem with it is that their primary idea is clear-cutting forest/jungle for biofuels is bad. Well, no duh! Article here.
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
Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change has said that the world has to
reverse the increase of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to avert
disastrous environment consequences.
In the wake of the new
studies, a group of 10 of the United States’s most eminent ecologists
and environmental biologists today sent a letter to President Bush and
the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi,
urging a reform of biofuels policies. “We write to call your attention
to recent research indicating that many anticipated biofuels will
actually exacerbate global warming,” the letter said.
The
European Union and a number of European countries have recently tried
to address the land use issue with proposals stipulating that imported
biofuels cannot come from land that was previously rain forest.
But
even with such restrictions in place, Dr. Searchinger’s study shows,
the purchase of biofuels in Europe and the United States leads
indirectly to the destruction of natural habitats far afield.
For
instance, if vegetable oil prices go up globally, as they have because
of increased demand for biofuel crops, more new land is inevitably
cleared as farmers in developing countries try to get in on the
profits. So crops from old plantations go to Europe for biofuels, while
new fields are cleared to feed people at home.
Likewise, Dr.
Fargione said that the dedication of so much cropland in the United
States to growing corn for bioethanol had caused indirect land use
changes far away. Previously, Midwestern farmers had alternated corn
with soy in their fields, one year to the next. Now many grow only
corn, meaning that soy has to be grown elsewhere.
Increasingly,
that elsewhere, Dr. Fargione said, is Brazil, on land that was
previously forest or savanna. “Brazilian farmers are planting more of
the world’s soybeans — and they’re deforesting the Amazon to do it,” he
said.
International environmental groups, including the United Nations,
responded cautiously to the studies, saying that biofuels could still
be useful. “We don’t want a total public backlash that would prevent us
from getting the potential benefits,” said Nicholas Nuttall, spokesman
for the United Nations Environment Program, who said the United Nations
had recently created a new panel to study the evidence.
“There was an unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver
bullet of climate change,” he said. “We fully believe that if biofuels
are to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, there
urgently needs to be better sustainability criterion.”
The
European Union has set a target that countries use 5.75 percent biofuel
for transport by the end of 2008. Proposals in the United States energy
package would require that 15 percent of all transport fuels be made
from biofuel by 2022. To reach these goals, biofuels production is
heavily subsidized at many levels on both continents, supporting a
burgeoning global industry.
Syngenta, the Swiss agricultural
giant, announced Thursday that its annual profits had risen 75 percent
in the last year, in part because of rising demand for biofuels.
Industry
groups, like the Renewable Fuels Association, immediately attacked the
new studies as “simplistic,” failing “to put the issue into context.”
“While
it is important to analyze the climate change consequences of differing
energy strategies, we must all remember where we are today, how world
demand for liquid fuels is growing, and what the realistic alternatives
are to meet those growing demands,” said Bob Dineen, the group’s
director, in a statement following the Science reports’ release.
“Biofuels
like ethanol are the only tool readily available that can begin to
address the challenges of energy security and environmental
protection,” he said.
The European Biodiesel Board says that
biodiesel reduces greenhouse gasses by 50 to 95 percent compared to
conventional fuel, and has other advantages as well, like providing new
income for farmers and energy security for Europe in the face of rising
global oil prices and shrinking supply.
But 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.”
