http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1267061-biofuels-hurting-environment-more-than-helping/
[The WRI 'study' that just won't die. Kind of like the claims that the
Keystone XL pipeline would create over 40,000 full-time jobs in the U.S.
(reality bite: that's actually 35 permanent full-time jobs in the U.S.
- 2-digit number, no trailing zeroes.)]
Biofuels Hurting Environment, More Than Helping
By Mike Gaworecki
February 28, 2015
A new report from the World Resources Institute finds that dedicating
land to the production of biofuels, a form of renewable energy made from
plants, may undermine efforts to achieve a sustainable food future,
combat climate change, and protect forests.
The global population hit seven billion in 2011 and is expected to grow
to nine billion in 2050. Feeding all those people without chopping down
forests for agriculture and livestock will already be a difficult task,
according to Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at WRI who wrote the
report. Dedicating land to the production of bioenergy crops will make
it much harder.
“The bottom line is, the world only has so much land, and we are going
to struggle to produce all the additional food we need by 2050 without
cutting down more forests,” Searchinger told mongabay.com. “And if you
add bioenergy to that it makes it virtually impossible.”
The problem, of course, is that if you dedicate land to growing crops
like sugarcane, corn, soybeans, or wood solely for the production of
biofuels, you can’t use that land to grow food–or as a carbon sink. We
already use a whopping three-fourths of the world’s vegetated land for
crops, livestock grazing, and wood harvests, according to the WRI paper.
And the remaining land really should be left as is, since it protects
clean water, supports biodiversity, and stores carbon.
The cost-benefit analysis simply doesn’t work out in bioenergy’s favor,
according to the report. Making ethanol from Brazilian sugarcane, for
instance, only converts around 0.2 percent of the sun’s energy. The
standard solar cells on the market today, by contrast, are capable of
generating as much as 100 times more energy per acre as biofuels. And as
the report points out, unlike biofuels, solar panels work great in
places where they aren’t in direct competition with food crops or
forests, such as desserts and rooftops.
Meanwhile, food for the ever-expanding global population will need to be
grown somewhere, and if we’re to avert runaway global warming we need
the world’s forests to be sequestering as much carbon as possible. But
one 2010 study found that the Amazon rainforest was likely to suffer due
to Brazil’s ambitious biofuel goals. While that study found that little
forest land would be directly converted to growing biofuel feedstocks,
the displacement of cattle ranching, one of the main uses of land in
Brazil, to other forest areas by bioenergy production would have a hefty
impact on the Amazon.
What Searchinger has found is that, essentially, global targets for
increased use of biofuels could lead to the same problem occurring in
forests around the globe.
“Some organizations have advocated for a bioenergy target of meeting 20
percent of the world’s total energy demand by the year 2050, which would
require around 225 exajoules of energy in biomass per year,” the report
states. “That amount, however, is roughly equivalent to the total amount
of biomass people harvest today—all the crops, plant residues, and trees
harvested by people for food, timber, and other uses, plus all the grass
consumed by livestock around the world.”
To meet a 20 percent biofuels target by 2050, Searchinger writes,
“humanity would need to at least double the world’s annual harvest of
plant material in all its forms. Those increases would have to come on
top of the already large increases needed to meet growing food and
timber needs. Even assuming large increases in efficiency, the quest for
bioenergy at a meaningful scale is both unrealistic and unsustainable.”
What about the direct climate benefits of using more biofuels?
Proponents argue that biofuels reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the
WRI report finds that conclusion to be based on faulty logic.
“Studies that find bioenergy reduces greenhouse gases incorrectly view
plants as a carbon-free fuel and ignore the very real carbon emitted by
burning them,” Searchinger wrote in a blog post about his report. “The
theory has been that the original growth of the plants absorbs enough
carbon to offset the carbon released when they burn. But if those plants
were going to grow and absorb carbon anyway – and typically they would –
then diverting them to bioenergy does not remove any additional carbon
from the atmosphere. Instead, bioenergy comes at the expense of some
other uses of those plants. When the expense is food or agricultural
land, the effect is poorer nutrition. When the expense is forests or
woody savannas, the effect is less stored carbon.”
Not all sources of bioenergy are problematic. Searchinger says that
municipal waste and forest and crop residues such as sawdust and corn
stalks, which do not require a dedicated use of land, have potential to
be part of the solution to the climate crisis, but only in limited
amounts, because there are limited quantities of these biomass sources
to begin with.
One of the biggest threats to forests from biofuels, Searchinger says,
is that forests are being chopped down to feed power plants. Europe, in
particular, has been aggressively using wood pellets supplied by
American companies to displace coal in power plants. Though the
companies supplying the pellets say they are harvesting the wood in a
sustainable manner, environmentalists are weary, and have been calling
on the European Union to reconsider. Even in the best-case scenario, the
use of wood pellets still results in a net gain in carbon emissions, as
it will take decades for the trees they came from to regrow.
But ultimately, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
determine how much expanded production of biofuels might have
contributed to global deforestation, let alone to project how future
biofuels targets might lead to the destruction of even more forests.
“Since we started expanding biofuels, cropping area has grown at a much
more rapid rate,” Searchinger says. “And how much that is effecting
forests, we don’t really know.”
Citations:
Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A.
Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R.
Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice, and J. R.
G. Townshend. 2013. “Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA Tree Cover Loss and
Gain Area.” University of Maryland, Google, USGS, and NASA. Accessed
through Global Forest Watch on Feb. 27, 2015. www.globalforestwatch.org.
Greenpeace, University of Maryland, World Resources Institute and
Transparent World. 2014. Intact Forest Landscapes: update and
degradation from 2000-2013. Accessed through Global Forest Watch on Feb.
27, 2015. www.globalforestwatch.org
Lapola, D. M., Schaldach, R., Alcamo, J., Bondeau, A., Koch, J.,
Koelking, C., & Priess, J. A. (2010). Indirect land-use changes can
overcome carbon savings from biofuels in Brazil. Proceedings of the
national Academy of Sciences, 107(8), 3388-3393.
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