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US Scientists Puncture The Ethanol Biofuel Bubble
By Mr Ethanol | February 14, 2008
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Good science news (or bad, depending on your point of view) has arrived with two reports on the carbon footprint of biofuels, in the paper edition of Science magazine. They deal serious damage to the belief - which up to now has been driving the biofuel bubble - that stepped-up ethanol production in the US is an answer to global warming.
Writing in “Use of US croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions for Land Use or Change,” Timothy Searchinger and many others state: “To produce more biofuels, farmers can directly plow up more forest or grassland, which releases to the atmosphere much of the carbon previously stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fire. The loss of maturing forests and grasslands also forgoes ongoing carbon sequestration as plants grow each year …” (A companion piece, “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt” by scientists at the University of Minnesota, covers similar territory.)
The scientists step on switch grass, too, a weed peddled by those promoting the still largely theoretical panacea of ethanol production direct from cellulose. “Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on US corn lands increase emissions by 50 per cent,” write the authors in the lead paragraph.
The news tosses a good deal of water on the biofuel fire. Unfortunately, the reports are subscription only and while there were a number of pirated copies flowing in email due to the electronic publication of the news last week, the perfectly awful figures still deserve some reporting. For example, the New York Times story on the reports ignored ugly figures like the percentage losses in feed crops contrasted with increases in emission, perhaps figuring correctly that the average reader is too stupid and easily bored to tolerate them. Since the Times has been a cheerleader for miracle alternative energy solutions, the reports were surely hard for it to swallow. One could imagine the nervous gulping in the paper’s second sentence. It noted that ethanol mania, therein called the “benefits of biofuels,” had come under attack and that the articles in the magazine would “add to the controversy.”
Topics: Biofuel, Ethanol, News, Positives, Science |
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