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The Worst Moment In History To Demand Biofuels
By Mr Ethanol | April 7, 2008
Enter Stage Right:
This is the worst moment in history to demand billions of gallons of biofuels from our farms.
I told the Sustainable Agriculture students at Iowa State University last month, “Human numbers are still expanding rapidly. With more people and higher incomes, we’d need to double farm output by 2050 even without biofuels. . . . Food needs will stabilize and then decline after 2050, but any wildlife species crowded off the planet by the huge land requirements of biofuels in the next 40 years will be gone forever.”
Unfortunately, at least three-fourths of the world’s wild species are in the warm tropics where we’re now going to grow millions of acres of sugar cane for ethanol and put in huge palm oil plantations for biodiesel.
I told my Iowa audience, “the Great Plains where we sit today had 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, prairie dogs and an interesting set of grasses. That isn’t many species, and those species have not gone extinct. But biofuels threaten thousands of species. Sugar cane takes less land per gallon of ethanol produced, but it’s produced on tropic lands with much more biodiversity than the Great Plains. Indonesia sits at the juncture of two incredibly species-rich ecosystems, yet we’re clearing it for biodiesel.
Every bit of poor-quality land we sacrifice for biofuels carries far more species risk than growing high yields on high-quality land with pesticides, fertilizers and biotech seeds.”
Meanwhile, burning those biofuels worsens the greenhouse gas problem. Two new studies in the journal Science (T. (Searchinger, 319:1238-40 and J. Fargione, 319: 1235-1238) point out that if the biofuels are grown on land converted from forest or grasses, the stored soil carbon gasses off into the air as CO2.
Topics: Biofuel, Market, Negatives, News |
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