Another hot topic

Just in case you're wondering, biofuels are not the answer. Or, more exactly, the biofuels that are getting heavily promoted are not the answer.

Two different studies announced earlier this year - one co-authored by Joe Fargione, founder of the Nature Conservancy, the other by Jörn Scharlemann and William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama - concluded that biofuels made from corn, sugar cane, and soy do more harm than good.

Although the fuels themselves emit fewer greenhouse gases, they all have higher costs in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland. ...

"Regardless of how effective sugar cane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the sugar cane fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases," [Scharlemann and Laurance said].

"Such comparisons become even more lopsided if the full environmental benefits of tropical forests - for example, for biodiversity conservation, hydrological functioning, and soil protection - are included." ...

In a study of 26 biofuels the Swiss method showed that 21 fuels reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 30% compared with gasoline when burned. But almost half of the biofuels, a total of 12, had greater total environmental impacts than fossil fuels. These included economically-significant fuels such as US corn ethanol, Brazilian sugar cane ethanol and soy diesel, and Malaysian palm-oil diesel.

Fargione, for his part, declared that the biofuels "we use now cause habitat destruction, either directly or indirectly." He said it "simply does not make sense to convert land for biofuels production" in an attempt to combat global warming because

[c]onverting land to grow corn, sugar cane or soy beans - crops used in the production of biofuels - creates a "biofuel carbon debt" by releasing 17 to 420 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas reductions which the biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels.

However, both studies stressed that not all biofuels were bad. Fargione cited biomass waste or forestry waste products such as wood chips as sources for biofuels, a position echoed by Scharlemann and Laurance, who add recycled cooking oil to the list. So don't give up on the idea yet.