[Sustain] Scientific American Article/Studies Drive Stake Into Heart Of Biofuels Illusion

[Eric Brooks]

Hi all,

This is the best condemnation of biofuels I have seen yet.

Scientific American Article Cites Studies Which Drive A Stake Into Heart 
Of The Biofuels Illusion

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=biofuels-bad-for-people-and-climate&print=true


  Scientific American

News <http://www.sciam.com/section.cfm?id=news> -  February 7, 2008


  Biofuels Are Bad for Feeding People and Combating Climate Change


    By displacing agriculture for food---and causing more land
    clearing---biofuels are bad for hungry people and the environment

By David Biello

Converting corn to ethanol 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=is-ethanol-for-the-long-h> in Iowa 
not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fragmentation-quickly-des>, 
researchers report in a pair of new studies in /Science,/ but also would 
do little to slow global warming---and often make it worse.

"Prior analyses made an accounting error," says one study's lead author, 
Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. "There 
is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare 
[2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels."

Growing plants store carbon 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-spend-10-years> in their 
roots, shoots and leaves. As a result, the world's plants and the soil 
in which they grow contain nearly three times as much carbon as the 
entire atmosphere. "I know when I look at a tree that half the dry 
weight of it is carbon," says ecologist David Tilman of the University 
of Minnesota, coauthor of the other study which examined the "carbon 
debt" embedded in any biofuel. "That's going to end up as carbon dioxide 
in the atmosphere when you cut it down."

By turning crops such as corn, sugarcane and palm oil into 
biofuels---whether ethanol, biodiesel, or something else 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=turning-whole-plants-into-fuel-in-four-simple-steps>---proponents 
hope to reap the benefits of the carbon soaked up as the plants grow to 
offset the carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) emitted when the resulting fuel is 
burned. But whether biofuels emit more or less CO_2 than gasoline 
depends on what the land they were grown on was previously used for, 
both studies show.

Tilman and his colleagues examined the overall CO_2 released when land 
use changes occur. Converting the grasslands of the U.S. to grow corn 
results in excess greenhouse gas emissions of 134 metric tons of CO_2 
per hectare---a debt that would take 93 years to repay by replacing 
gasoline with corn-based ethanol. And converting jungles to palm 
plantations or tropical rainforest to soy fields would take centuries to 
pay back their carbon debts. "Any biofuel that causes land clearing is 
likely to increase global warming," says ecologist Joseph Fargione of 
The Nature Conservancy, lead author of the second study. "It takes 
decades to centuries to repay the carbon debt that is created from 
clearing land."

Diverting food crops into fuel production leads to ever more land 
clearing 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=combating-climate-change-farming-forestry> 
as well. Ethanol demand in the U.S., for example, has caused some 
farmers to plant more corn and less soy. This has driven up soy prices 
causing farmers in Brazil to clear more Amazon rainforest land to plant 
valuable soy, Searchinger's study notes. Because a soy field contains 
far less carbon than a rainforest, the greenhouse gas benefit of the 
original ethanol is wiped out. "Corn-based ethanol, instead of producing 
a 20 percent savings [in greenhouse gas emissions], nearly doubles 
greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 
167 years," the researchers write. "We can't get to a result with corn 
ethanol where we can generate greenhouse gas benefits," Searchinger adds.

Turning food into fuel also has the unintended consequence of driving up 
food prices, reducing the access of the neediest populations to grains 
and meat. "It's equivalent to saying we will try to reduce greenhouse 
gases by reducing food consumption," Searchinger says. "Unfortunately, a 
lot of that comes from the world's poorest people."

"We are converting their food into our fuel," Tilman notes. " The 
typical driver of an SUV spends as much on fuel in a month as the poorer 
third of the world spend on food."

The studies do find some benefit from biofuels but only when planted on 
agricultural land too dry or degraded 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn> 
for food production or significant tree or plant growth and only when 
derived from native plants, such as a mix of prairie grasses 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=amber-waves-of-gas-gasoli> in the 
U.S. Midwest. Or such fuels can be made from waste: corn stalks, 
leftover wood from timber production or even city garbage.

But that will not slake a significant portion of the growing thirst for 
transportation fuels 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-happening-effects-severe-what-cost-fix-it>. 
"If we convert every corn kernel grown today in the U.S. to ethanol we 
offset just 12 percent of our gasoline use," notes ecologist Jason Hill 
of the University of Minnesota. "The real benefit to these advanced 
biofuels may not be in displacement of fossil fuels but in the building 
up of carbon stores in the soil."

Of course, there is another reason for biofuels: energy independence. 
"Biofuels like ethanol are the only tool readily available that can 
begin to address the challenge of energy security," Bob Dinneen, 
president of industry group the Renewable Fuels Association said in a 
statement. "The alternative is to continue to exploit increasingly 
costlier fossil fuels for which the environmental price tag will be great."

But the environmental price tag of biofuels now joins the ranks of 
other, cheaper domestic fuel sources---such as coal-to-liquid fuel 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=pumping-coal>---as major sources of 
globe-warming pollution 
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=worse-than-gasoline> as well as 
unintended social consequences. As a result, 10 prominent scientists 
have written a letter to President Bush and other government leaders 
urging them to "shape policies to assure that government incentives for 
biofuels do not increase global warming."

"We shouldn't abandon biofuels," Searchinger says. But "you don't solve 
global warming by going in the wrong direction."


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