Below is an interesting piece on the climate impact that biofuels have. Take a look!
Biofuels add to greenhouse gases
Cultivation release exceeds carbon cuts
By Alan Zarembo - LOS ANGELES TIMES
Updated: 02/08/08 6:43 AM
- LOS ANGELES — The rush to grow biofuel crops — widely embraced as part of the solution to global warming — actually is increasing greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Science.
One analysis found that clearing forests and grasslands to grow the crops releases vast amounts of carbon into the air — far more than the carbon reductions resulting from using biofuels instead of gasoline.
“We’re rushing into biofuels, and we need to be very careful,” said Jason Hill, an economist and ecologist at the University of Minnesota who co-authored the study. “It’s a little frightening to think that something this well-intentioned might be very damaging.”
Even converting farmed land from food to biofuel crops increases greenhouse gas emissions as food production is shifted to other parts of the world, resulting in the destruction of more forests and grasslands to make way for farmland, the second study found.
The analysis calculated that a U.S. cornfield devoted to producing ethanol would have to be farmed for 167 years before it would begin to achieve a net reduction in emissions.
“Any biofuel that uses productive land is going to create more greenhouse gas emissions than it saves,” said Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the study’s lead author.
Since 2000, annual U.S. production of corn-based ethanol has jumped to 6.5 billion gallons from 1.6 billion gallons, supplying about 5 percent of the nation’s fuel for transportation, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry lobbying group.
Federal legislation passed last year calls for more than doubling ethanol production over the next decade.
Hill’s analysis looked at the amount of carbon in forests and grasslands that is released into the air when soils are turned over and vegetation rots or is burned away.
The study found that clearing an Indonesian peat land rain forest to make way for a biofuel plantation — a conversion that is rapidly occurring to satisfy Europe’s rising demand for biodiesel — releases so much carbon that starting to achieve a net reduction in emissions would take 423 years.
Searchinger’s study focused on the global effect of changing the use of farmland. U.S. farmers have been replacing soybean fields with cornfields to meet the rising demand for ethanol, lowering the world supply of soybeans and driving up their price. As a result, farmers in Brazil are clearing rain forest to plant soybeans.
His model estimated that devoting 12.8 million hectares of cornfields in the United States for ethanol production would bring 10.8 million hectares of additional land into cultivation worldwide, including 2.8 million hectares in Brazil and 2.3 million hectares in China and India — much of it forests and grasslands.
link: http://www.buffalonews.com/nationalworld/national/story/271257.html#
