Cheers,
Cher Linn
"Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class. But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it." - Michael Grunwald, The Clean Energy Scam.
In the latest cover story of TIME Magazine, Grunwald writes about the basic problem concerning the use of alternative fuels (in this case, corn ethanol): since researchers have mostly ignored the prospect of using corn ethanol on a wide scale, the sudden transition means that the land used to grow fuel leads to deforestation of areas which store large amounts of carbon.
I found the entire article to be extremely interesting, so I feel compelled to share some bits of information about it on this blog. (You can read the full article here.)
The article focuses on the deforestation of the Amazon forest in Brazil. What happens is:
1. 1/5 of the US corn crop is diverted in more than 100 ethanol refineries. The increased demand boosts the price of corn to record levels.
2. Eager to cash in, many US soybean farmers switch to corn. Soybean prices rise as supplies decline.
3. To meet global demand for soybeans, Brazilian farmers expand into fields previously used as cattle pasturelands. Displaced ranchers clear new grazing lands in the Amazon or the Cerrado savanna, releasing carbon.
When the deforestation is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline (Science magazine). In other words, the apparent solution to the one of the world's biggest problems is one big problem on its own.
The math of all this is surprisingly simple, and I'm knocking myself on the head for never even thinking about this before. And clearly, a lot of people have not thought about it (or have, and chose to ignore it for political reasons) - The US quintupled its production of ethanol and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. And since there's much more money to be made from tearing the forests down than to preserve them, it's extremely difficult to tell Brazilian farmers not to make use of the resources they have to grow crops for the alternative fuel market.
Also, the article also touches on the other non-environmentally-related consequences of the so-called 'clean energy myth'. For example, because corn is being grown for production of ethanol fuels, there is less food available on the market, so the poor will eat less due to soaring food prices. It is predicted that by 2025, the ranks of the hungry will increase to 1.2 billion after adjusting inflationary effects of biofuels (four years ago, it was predicted to fall to 625 million).
