Turning Food into Fuel is Worse than Burning Gasoline for the Planet
Ronald Bailey | February 7, 2008, 5:39pm
Producing biofuels using food crops will release more global warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than producing and burning good old-fashioned gasoline, say new studies published today in Science.
New Scientist sums the research up this way:
The new studies examine a different part of biofuel equation, and both suggest that the emissions associated with the crops may be even worse than that.
One analysis looks at land that is switched to biofuel crop production. Carbon will be released when forests are felled or bush cleared, and longer-term emissions created by dead roots decaying.
This creates what Joseph Fargione of The Nature Conservancy and colleagues call a "carbon debt". Emissions savings generated by the biofuels will help pay back this debt, but in some cases this can take centuries, suggests their analysis.
If 10,000 square metres of Brazilian rainforest is cleared to make way for soya beans – which are used to make biodiesel – over 700,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide is released.
The saving generated by the resulting biodiesel will not cancel that out for around 300 years, says Fargione. In the case of peat land rainforest in Indonesia, which is being cleared to grow palm oil, the debt will take over 400 years to repay, he says.
The carbon debts associated with US corn are measured in tens rather than hundreds of years. But the second study suggests that producing corn for fuel rather than food could have dramatic knock-on effects elsewhere.
Corn is used to feed cattle and demand for meat is high, so switching land to biofuel production is likely to prompt farmers in Brazil and elsewhere to clear forests and other lands to create new cropland to grow the missing corn.
When the carbon released by those clearances is taken into account, corn ethanol produces nearly twice as much carbon as petrol.
"The implications of these changes in land use have not been appreciated up until now," says Alex Farrell, at the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Farrell adds that biofuels could still prove useful in the fight against climate change, but using different approaches – such as focusing on crops for both food and fuel, or new technology for generating biofuels from food waste.
Of course, the studies may not pan out, but still the fact that Congress just mandated the production of 36 billion gallons of bio-ethanol for transport fuel by 2022 might give one pause to consider the virtues of letting government officials select our future energy technologies. Yes, I know, I know, the legislation mandates that about half of it must come from cellulosic sources, not food, but nobody knows how to do that yet economically.
Did someone say something about carbon taxes?
reason has long opposed mandating biofuels. And here, here and here, too.
Ken Shultz | February 7, 2008, 10:04pm | #
"This may take a few years to reach, but eventually. Is the government just going to give up that revenue? I think not. It will be like the cigarette tax."
I agree. The government will likely continue to tax us to whatever extent we find tolerable.
I suspect we may find carbon taxes less tolerable, generally, but then I remember when the government said my dad could only buy gasoline on even dates 'cause his license plate ended in an even number. ...people got mad.
I suspect people may grow less tolerant of the income tax once we've gone ten years or so without one.
...but even if the rate at which carbon is taxed continues to escalate, over time, I expect the rate at which income and capital gains are taxed to escalate in line with government spending too. ...and I'd have the government tax carbon rather than income and capital gains.
I guess that's the part I can't seem to get across to my fellow libertarians and conservatives--it's that income and capital gains taxes are so irrational and so destructive that just getting rid of them, other things being equal, would be such a huge plus.
We've dreamed of moving from where we are to a flat tax or--better yet--a sales tax since the Reagan Administration. Well here comes the sales tax we've been hoping for on a silver plate!
I think we can get a sizable portion of the progressive vote on our side for this, but some of us are against it because, what, we don't think global warming is real? ...because we're not sure climate change will have a significant or adverse impact?
I don't understand why those objections are even relevant.
It's like when the state lottery calls to tell you you've won a million dollars. You don't quibble about whether you like the governor--you take the friggin' money! If I'm hearing progressives tell me they want to get rid of the income tax, I don't quibble about my bedfellows--I just agree.
And I encourage any progressives and environmentalists out there--talk to your friends! Tell them they either have to explain how our economy is going to survive a carbon tax or they have to get behind the elimination of almost every other tax except for the carbon tax.
...or just watch the world go up in smoke! Do it for the children! ...blah, blah, blah. You know the drill.
Mark Delucchi | February 8, 2008, 11:14pm | #
The basic point of these studies is correct: the development of biofuels can cause changes in land use that lead to relatively large emissions of carbon from soils and biomass. Indeed, this basic finding has been known, and quantified, for almost 20 years. The Searchinger et al. paper does do something relatively new: it uses an agricultural model to estimate global changes in production and consumption, the first step in estimating emissions due to land use change. (It also has a detailed treatment of changes in land use by type of ecosystem.) However, both papers suffer three serious general deficiencies, apart from whatever legitimate questions one might have about details of the modeling.
First, the studies do not have a complete conceptual treatment of what happens over time. Most importantly, they ignore the carbon sequestration that will tend to happen when the biofuel programs end and the land-use changes that occurred at the start of the program are reversed. Related to this, the explicit or implicit treatment of the timing of impacts in the studies – namely, that there is no distinction to be made between climate impacts that occur today and climate impacts that occur many decades from now – is not economically realistic.
Second, changes in land use affect much more than just carbon stocks in soils and biomass: they also affect albedo, hydrodynamics, the nitrogen cycle, dust emissions, and more. All of these omitted factors can have significant effects on climate, and not all of these effects are “bad” (i.e., warming). Without doing a comprehensive analysis of all of the climate-relevant effects of land-use change, it is not possible to make general statements about the effects of land-use change on climate.
Third, both studies add emissions from land-use change to emissions from the rest of the lifecycle of biofuels, and then make general statements about how considering land-use change affects total emissions from and the overall desirability of biofuels. However, there is as yet no remotely good model of emissions from the “rest” of the life cycle of biofuels, and as a result it is not possible to make any definitive statements about the overall impact of considering land-use change emissions in lifecycle analysis.
In sum, these studies highlight an important (and generally well known) effect of the development of biofuels, but leave out a great many important factors, and do not tell us anything definitive about the overall impact of biofuels on climate.
Mark Delucchi
Institute of Transportation Studies
University of California, Davis
www.its.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/delucchi
Jacquelyn | February 9, 2008, 3:02pm | #
This is, unsurprisingly, just a bunch of government propaganda being spoon fed to us. What they're not telling you is that thousands of acres of rain forests have already been and are continuing to be cleared for factory farming, e.g. the raising of cattle for mass production in the modern meat industry. The animals on these overcrowded factory farms are a major contributor to global warming, more than automobiles and transportation. 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions are released from these farms, in fact, compared to the 13.5% emitted from transport.
These pastures account for 70% of the deforested areas in the Amazon. Any idiot could reason that if these pastures that ALREADY EXIST could be, even if only partially, converted into land solely for the use of growing these crops to be converted into biofuel, no additional forests would have to be destroyed.
Oh, and here's the kicker: Biofuel doesn't have to come from new crops, morons. It can just as easily, and more efficiently, be made from used kitchen grease and cooking oils. So in other words we have the source right at our fingertips - there's a restaurant on every corner in America and kitchens certainly aren't scarce in the rest of the modern world, either.
Our politicians don't want you to know this because they are funded by, and essentially work for, this massive, ridiculously profitable industry. Corporate factory farms and the government that collects revenue from them don't want anyone to know the truth about global warming because it would drastically impact their bottom-lines. Period.
It's time to speak out and let these people know that we're smarter and better informed than they think we are.
Do the research. Here's a link to get you started: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com
