The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #1, Land use changes, emissions
A pair of articles in Science magazine at the beginning of the year set the tone for a negative debate on the role of biofuels, when two sets of researchers challenged the effectiveness of biofuels as a climate-change mitigation strategy.
A team led by Timothy Searchinger offered an indirect land-use impact model that showed a sharply negative impact from biofuels, unless grown on degraded or unproductive land. A second study indicated that converting land to biofuels production would release stored-up carbon and create a carbon debt that it would take up to 400 years to repay in some models.
The reaction poured in from the world’s media, almost universally dismissing the potential for biofuels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Register
San Francisco Chronicle
World Changing
Wall Street Journal
Science
The Morning Call
TIME
National Post (Canada)
The Nature Conservancy
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Washington Post
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg chimed in with a prediction at the United Nations that the US Energy Independence and Security Act will prompt widespread global starvation. Previous predictions of mass starvation from biofuels expansion had been limited to personalities such as Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, among others.
The lead author of one of the studies, Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, offered some hope in a Science magazine podcast interview</a>.
“The key” he said, “is you want to avoid using productive land because for the most part that productive land is either producing a lot of carbon benefits, carbon savings right now or food that has to be replaced. So that means, for example, if we make biofuels out of waste products, we don’t have that land conversion problem. And that’s a pure benefit. There is also some thought that you might be able to find really degraded, marginal cropland and use that to produce biofuels on. That may, in fact, be true in some cases, but it’s going to be very, very specific because if it’s degraded, not producing a lot of crops, the question is whether it will produce a lot of biofuels.
The complete supporting online material from the Searchinger study, including well-to-wheel emission tables can be downloaded (free) here.
Nathanael Green, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, offered the most thoughtful analysis to date of two articles that appeared in Science magazine.
“Do yesterday’s Science articles mean that all biofuels are bad and that the recently passed RFS is going to harm the climate? The short answer is no and no,” Green writes, adding that “The dynamics the authors have identified are undeniable–if you clear land to grow crop for biofuels you have to account for the emissions from that clearing and if you induce clearing by driving up crop and land prices, you also have to take responsibility for those emissions.
“For laying out these dynamics and giving us a sense of the scale,” Greene continues, “we all owe them a debt of gratitude, particularly Searchinger and his team because the emissions from indirect land are hard for many to understand.”
However, he added, “Fortunately, we knew about these dynamics before yesterday, and we’ve won a preemptive victory in getting the dynamics written into the legislation in the form of the land-use safeguards and minimum lifecycle GHG standards.”
“So I would caution folks from assuming that either article means that no crop-based biofuels will be able to comply with the RFS or that their analyses are definitive.”
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