Bio-Fuels Aren’t A Green Fuel

I've heard over and over again how ethanol and bio-fuels are the new "green' fuel and are going to save our planet. Guess what, they appear to be wrong.<br />n<br />n<a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=biofuels-bad-for-people-and-climate">Biofuels Are Bad for Feeding People and Combating Climate Change</a><br />n<br />n<blockquote>Converting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report in a pair of new studies in Science, but also would do little to slow global warming—and often make it worse.<br />n<br />n"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."</blockquote><br />n<br />nWow, ethanol might make global warming worse? How "green' can you get. How does ethanol make global warming worse? Land use changes.<br />n<br />n<blockquote>Tilman and his colleagues examined the overall CO2 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 CO2 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."<br />n<br />nDiverting food crops into fuel production leads to ever more land clearing 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.</blockquote><br />n<br />nNow everyone here knows my thoughts on ethanol and food but read on for a scietific take on it.<br />n<br />n<blockquote>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."<br />n<br />n"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."</blockquote><br />n<br />nYea, fill that SUV with ethanol and take food from poor people's mouths. Makes you feel real good, doesn't it? So, how does ethanol rate for it's environmental price tag? Right up there with coal-to liquid- fuel.<br />n<br />n<blockquote>But the environmental price tag of biofuels now joins the ranks of other, cheaper domestic fuel sources—such as coal-to-liquid fuel—as major sources of globe-warming pollution 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."</blockquote><br />n<br />nThis euphoria over bio-fuels might be a little premature it seems. Maybe there is more of a price tag to it than people think. That is all I have been trying to say all along around here. I really don't have a problem with ethanol and bio-fuels. I just think this massive amount of government subsidies and government targets for usage are a little premature. We don't know all the consequences of what we are attempting and we need to slow down and look this over a little more careful. The poor not having enough food bothers me more than the greenhouse gas stuff but it all is concerning and needs looking at.<br />n<br />nMore and more people are seeing this and now maybe our government should too. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/biofuels-make-climate-change-worse-scientific-study-concludes-779811.html">Over in Europe</a> they are begging to question their bio-fuels target.<br />n<br />n<blockquote>The European Union is already having second thoughts about its policy aimed at stimulating the production of biofuel. Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner, admitted last month that the EU did not foresee the scale of the environmental problems raised by Europe's target of deriving 10 per cent of its transport fuel from plant material.</blockquote><br />n<br />nIt really makes you set back and think a little doesn't it. What's right, fuel from oil or fuel from plants? Which is greener? I really don't know but maybe we should be concentrating on something else. Something like conservation. Maybe we need to think a little more along those lines too. Jumping on new bandwagon like bio-fuels isn't always the answer to our problems.<br />n<br />n<strong>You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data. Daniel K. Moran </strong>