I have always been a supporter of renewable energy and renewable fuels and have fought to bring them onto my campus, so I certainly never thought this would happen. I seem to have caught Climate Progress’s Joe Romm, the British environmentalist George Monbiot, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the last refuge of global warming deniers, agreeing on something. What? Opposing Biofuels.
From Joe Romm:
ClimateProgress has covered one tricky facet of our forests before by looking at how misplaced afforestation can propel warming. Now word is spreading that plantation forests for biofuel and ethanol crops are rivaling natural forests. In the process, clearing the land emits mass amounts of carbon dioxide and the ecosystem replanted to harvest fuel tends to be worse for the environment. [Source]
From George Monbiot:
So what’s wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats. [Source]
From the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
There are significant trade-offs, however, involved in the massive expansion of the production of corn and other crops for fuel. Chief among these would be a shift of major amounts of the world’s food supply to fuel use when significant elements of the human population remains ill-fed . . . Biofuels are a cop-out and a boondoggle rolled into one. [PDF]
However, it seems that there is hope after all and while all sides might agree that ethanol from corn or biodiesel from oil palm might be an environmental boondoggle, it isn’t our only choice. David Tilman, one of the most distinguished ecologists in the world (as well as awfully nice), has discovered that prairie restoration on degraded land doesn’t just sound nice, but can produce 238% more bioenergy than a field planted with a monoculture grass. Also, it uses little to no fertilizers or pesticide, no tilling, and actually is a carbon-negative fuel as the grasses store carbon in the soil. [Washington Post] So while I can now admit that I can find common cause on corn ethanol with even the CEI, I won’t give up on biofuels just yet.
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I am an advocate for the use of biofuels. I’m not sure, though, if I agree that using food crops to derive the biofuels is a smart idea. Using waste oil for small scale facilities will work just fine. As far as mass production goes, I believe we will need to continue researching the possibility of extracting oil from cultivated algae. We know its possible and algae stores far more energy than crops that are currently being used. The obstacle will be figuring out how to develop large-scale facilities.
Richard, nice post. I appreciate that you end by discussing other possible sources for biofuels that don’t carry the same ecological consequences as ethanol from corn and biodiesel from palm oil. That’s a level of nuance that many seem to miss, either hopping on the “ethanol is evil” or “ethanol is our savior” bandwagon.
Ethanol from corn is neither a solution to fossil fuel dependence or global warming and is more about farm subsidies than either. It’s time we stop giving more support to corn ethanol, which amounts to only a small incremental improvement in lifecycle or well-to-wheels fossil energy use or greenhouse gas emissions (and even that’s debated, with some claiming ethanol takes more fossil energy to produce than it displaces when used).
Palm oil biodiesel is better when it comes to displacing fossil fuels, and potentially for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, but when it comes at the cost of massive deforestation and habitat destruction, we end up no better off than where we started. The same is true of biodiesel from soy grown on plantations in cleared rainforest lands, as has been an expanding practice in Brazil in recent years.
We need to be careful in examining our options for replacing fossil fuels in transportation. We don’t want to end up trading one unsustainable, polluting option for another. Luckily, we do have many options. Some may require a bit more work to commercialize, but biofuels from sustainably harvested biomass crops, like the prairie grasses you mentioned, as well as agricultural, forestry and urban wastes can displace perhaps up to 1/3rd of our current oil use. Fueling up highly efficient plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that get their remaining fuel from an electricity grid with a growing share of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal could displace the entirety of our oil use for transportation.
A sustainable energy future is possible, even for transportation fuels. However, we must be careful in plotting the course we take to get there.
Cheers,
Jesse Jenkins
Good Site! Keep Doing That!B