Mandating Biofuel Use Could be “Totally Insane”
Posted: March 24th, 2008 | Author: Daniel | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »The former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the British government’s top environment scientist, Robert Watson, is very concerned about biofuel. He told BBC radio that, “It would obviously be totally insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of biofuels that’s actually leading to an increase in the greenhouse gases from biofuels.”
But way things look right now biofuels “actually emit more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels they aim to replace.” According to a study published in Nature:
According to the study, co-authored by Joe Fargione, a regional scientist for the [Nature] Conservancy, “converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they replace.”
Seventeen to 420 times more carbon dioxide isn’t even close to being a good fuel in term of greenhouse gas emissions. Couple that with the subsidies Americans and Europeans are paying for biofuels and biofuels are even more. To this add the fact that biofuels are driving up the prices of staple grains, making it more difficult for the poorest people in the world to afford food and biofuels make oil look positively benign.
I have attended a number of lectures at Yale covering biofuels and CO2, no debate is ever tolerated over biofuels as a political alternative rather than one based upon practicability. Also the DOE Clean Cities movement now in 90 cities is nothing more than a social club talking about using biofuels. Science as it is used by the political movement is no longer about debate, rather accepting without question what government funded junk scientist promulgate as religion.
Biodiesel from algae seems to be the way out of the CO2 dilemma. Otherwise, high oil yielding weeds that will grow on poor land, fertilized by humanure may solve two problems at once but American enterprise is currently focused up it’s own ass, so it will take the Chinese venture Capitalist or others to show us how.