Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/07/2008 5:07:09 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming.
The researchers said that past studies showing the benefits of ethanol in combating climate change have not taken into account almost certain changes in land use worldwide if ethanol from corn — and in the future from other feedstocks such as switchgrass — become a prized commodity.
"Using good cropland to expand biofuels will probably exacerbate global warming," concludes the study published in Science magazine.
The researchers said that farmers under economic pressure to produce biofuels will increasingly "plow up more forest or grasslands," releasing much of the carbon formerly stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fires. Globally, more grasslands and forests will be converted to growing the crops to replace the loss of grains when U.S. farmers convert land to biofuels, the study said.
The Renewable Fuels Association, which represents ethanol producers, called the researchers' view of land-use changes "simplistic" and said the study "fails to put the issue in context."
"Assigning the blame for rainforest deforestation and grassland conversion to agriculture solely on the renewable fuels industry ignores key factors that play a greater role," said Bob Dinneen, the association's president.
There has been a rush to developing biofuels, especially ethanol from corn and cellulosic feedstock such as switchgrass and wood chips, as a substitute for gasoline. President Bush signed energy legislation in December that mandates a six-fold increase in ethanol use as a fuel to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, calling the requirement key to weaning the nation from imported oil.
The new "green" fuel, whether made from corn or other feedstocks, has been widely promoted — both in Congress and by the White House — as a key to combating global warming. Burning it produces less carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, than the fossil fuels it will replace.
During the recent congressional debate over energy legislation, lawmakers frequently cited estimates that corn-based ethanol produces 20 percent less greenhouse gases in production, transportation and use than gasoline, and that cellulosic ethanol has an even greater benefit of 70 percent less emissions.
The study released Thursday by researchers affiliated with Princeton University and a number of other institutions maintains that these analyses "were one-sided" and counted the carbon benefits of using land for biofuels but not the carbon costs of diverting land from its existing uses.
"The other studies missed a key factor that everyone agrees should have been included, the land use changes that actually are going to increase greenhouse gas emissions," said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and lead author of the study.
The study said that after taking into account expected worldwide land-use changes, corn-based ethanol, instead of reducing greenhouse gases by 20 percent, will increases it by 93 percent compared to using gasoline over a 30-year period. Biofuels from switchgrass, if they replace croplands and other carbon-absorbing lands, would result in 50 percent more greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers concluded.
Not all ethanol would be affected by the land-use changes, the study said.
"We should be focusing on our use of biofuels from waste products" such as garbage, which would not result in changes in agricultural land use, Searchinger said in an interview. "And you have to be careful how much you require. Use the right biofuels, but don't require too much too fast. Right now we're making almost exclusively the wrong biofuels."
The study included co-authors affiliated with Iowa State University, the Woods Hole Research Center and the Agricultural Conservation Economics. It was supported in part indirectly by a grants from NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program, and by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Searchinger, in addition to his affiliation with Princeton, is a fellow at the Washington-based German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The study prompted a letter Thursday to President Bush and Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress from nearly a dozen scientists who urged them to pursue a policy "that ensures biofuels are not produced on productive forests, grassland or cropland."
"Some opportunities remain to produce environmentally beneficial biofuels" while "unsound biofuel policies could sacrifice tens of hundreds of million of acres" of grasslands and forests while increasing global warming, said the scientists, including four members of the National Academy of Sciences.
Global warming is real but it is not weather related it is a disease of the brain.... causing the mind and spine to become mush.
The new “green” fuel, whether made from corn or other feedstocks, has been widely promoted — both in Congress and by the White House — as a key to combating global warming. Burning it produces less carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, than the fossil fuels it will replace.
During the recent congressional debate over energy legislation, lawmakers frequently cited estimates that corn-based ethanol produces 20 percent less greenhouse gases in production, transportation and use than gasoline, and that cellulosic ethanol has an even greater benefit of 70 percent less emissions.
The study released Thursday by researchers affiliated with Princeton University and a number of other institutions maintains that these analyses “were one-sided” and counted the carbon benefits of using land for biofuels but not the carbon costs of diverting land from its existing uses.
“The other studies missed a key factor that everyone agrees should have been included, the land use changes that actually are going to increase greenhouse gas emissions,” said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and lead author of the study.
Oh you foolish mortals.
Thought the rush to biofuels, first and foremost, was to lessen our dependency on foreign oil?
This is the new Miles Javlon, a full-size, highway capable electric car that will become one of several available in the U.S. in 2008
Then there is Art Haines up in Maine
with his Sunn Solar Car kit which gets
infinity miles per gallon with Video
Less Global Warming pollution ”Commercial electric power plants are the only source of global-warming pollutants from battery electric vehicles. When BEVs (battery electric vehicles) recharge using renewable energy sources, they do not cause any global warming emissions at all. Even if BEVs are recharged using fossil fuels, they can cut global warming emissions by as much as 70 percent.”
Source of Quote: The Union of Concerned Scientists at http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/cars_pickups_suvs/batteryelectric-vehicles.html
Global warming is also known as the Global tendency to chat about the weather.
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
The way this hysteria is going with corn prices and ethanol nonsense, the poor farmers in the Amazon will tear down the rain forests even faster for a piece of fake cake.
Art Haines Video can be appreciated for seeing that in small town America there still remains Yankee ingenuity which “makes for better living”!
(nice little film)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0JNohHaqM4
I can eat corn but I cannot eat coal. It is foolish to sit on the coal in order to preserve our pristine environment while planting corn fence to fence. With the 51 cents per gallon ethanol subsidy and the tax credits and tax concessions that government gives to ethanol refiners, we end up paying at least twice: once for the subsidy and at least once again in higher prices for food.
Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds.
This major challenge to conventional thinking is the surprising finding of a study published today in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences by Dr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography and one of the world's leading experts on tropical deforestation.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/uol-nce010708.php
International Herald Tribune
2 studies conclude that biofuels are not so green after all
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the pollution caused by producing these “green” fuels is taken into account, two studies published Thursday have concluded.
The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months as scientists have evaluated the global environmental cost of their production. The new studies, published by the journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.
These studies for the first time take a comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of 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 - increases the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere because the ecosystems are the planet’s natural sponge for carbon emissions.
“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, the lead author of one of the studies and a researcher on the environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously, there’s been an accounting error: Land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”
Plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they are burned is balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grow. But even that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuel causes it own emissions - through refining and transport, for example.
The land-use issue makes the balance sheet far more problematic: 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, the lead author of the other study 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 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the world has to reverse the increase of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to avert disastrous environmental consequences.
Together, the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It doesn’t matter if it is rain forest or scrub land that is cleared, although the former releases more emissions than the latter. Taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted in such clearing, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not.
The European Union and a number of national governments have recently tried to address the land-use issue with proposals for regulations stipulating that imported biofuels cannot come from land that was previously rain forest, for example.
But even with such restrictions, Searchinger’s study said, the purchase of biofuels in Europe and the United States leads indirectly to the destruction of natural habitats. If vegetable oil prices go up globally, as they have because of increased demand for biofuel crops, new land is inevitably cleared as farmers in developing countries switch production. Crops from old plantations and fields go to Europe for biofuels, but new fields and plantations are created to feed people at home.
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, U.S. farmers rotated corn with soybeans in their fields, alternating years. Now many grow only corn, meaning that soybeans must be grown elsewhere. That elsewhere, Fargione said, is increasingly 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 and 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 UN Environment Program.
“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.” He added that the United Nations had recently created a panel to study the evidence.
The EU has mandated that countries use 5.75 percent biofuel for transport by the end of 2008. In the United States, a proposed 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. On Thursday, Syngenta, a major global agricultural conglomerate in Switzerland that is involved in biofuel crops reported that its annual profit rose by 75 percent in the past year.
Bob Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association in Washington, said the studies had “failed to put the issue in 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,” he said. “Biofuels like ethanol are the only tool readily available that can begin to address the challenges of energy security and environmental protection.”
Most of the biofuel sold in Europe is biodiesel made from vegetable oils. Most of the biofuel in the United States is ethanol made from corn. “EU decision makers cannot ignore that the EU fuel market” is experiencing “an enduring diesel deficit - the EU is more and more dependent on Russia for conventional diesel imports,” the European Biodiesel Board, a major industry group, said. The group has pushed for a sustainability certification program for biofuels, as well as criteria for assessing the greenhouse gas performance of such fuels, with input from industry.
But the new studies suggested that when land use is taken into account few, if any biofuels, will be acceptable.
“This land-use problem is not just a secondary effect,” Searchinger said. “It is major. The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland.”
The only possible exception he could see for now, he said, was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which takes 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 raising crops, such as those made from agricultural waste products.
The land-use debate started in the Netherlands in 2006, when researchers from Wetlands International and elsewhere found that imported palm oil used to generate “clean” electricity was often grown on palm plantations in Southeast Asia created from cleared peat land. The Dutch government has since canceled the palm oil subsidy and banned imports of the fuel, while hoping to develop better criteria to support sustainable biofuels. Even Wetlands does not support a total ban on biofuels, noting that some may be helpful.
Alex Kaat, a spokesman for the group, said: “If the whole point of biofuels directives was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve found out that most biofuels are not really better than conventional fuels at that.”
Notes:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php
no matter, the farm welfare will only increase.
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