Less Money for Evaluating Biofuels
Producing ethanol might increase greenhouse emissions, but the funding to find out is being cut.
Kevin Bullis 02/25/2008
- 5 Comments
The EPA is slated to get less money than in previous years to analyze the effects of biofuels use. The proposed cut comes at a time when that money may be needed more than ever.
Energy Washington Week reports that President Bush's proposed 2009 budget for an EPA program related to analyzing biofuels would cut funds by almost 10 percent compared with this year. If anything, the funding should be going up. Congress recently passed, and President Bush signed into law, legislation that would dramatically increase the amount of biofuels used in the United States. At the same time, researchers have published work in the journal Science suggesting that producing biofuels could increase rather than decrease greenhouse-gas emissions. Biofuels, in other words, could make worse the very problem that they are supposed to help solve.
The results are not definitive, and much depends on how the biofuels are produced. (See this Science article.) But before biofuels production ramps up too much, it would be good to know whether they are making things better or worse.
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bj
50 Comments
Lawrence Berkeley Labs have good info
David Fridley out at Lawrence Berkeley Labs has good info on this. He's put together a strong empirical chain of evidence that production of Biofuels of any sort (other than perhaps waste reclamation from other uses) use almost as much energy as they create, and they decimate land that would otherwise be a carbon sponge, so they don't do much to solve the problem of CO2. If you realize that in the US there is roughly the same land being used for farm production now as in the year 1900, yet we have almost triple the population, the question gets more interesting. And if all this biomass is being used to produce fuels, how are we going to fertilize food crops? More petrochemicals? Our economy is already feeling pressure from this, as food prices rise worldwide, as was reported in the NYTimes a couple weeks ago.
So the research has already been done. Now they need to cut funding to subsidies.
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DJTal
154 Comments
Re: Lawrence Berkeley Labs have good info
Biofuels don't HAVE to lead to an increase in CO2 . It all depends on how the increase in production comes about . So instead of pointing out the negative potential , why not suggest ways in which in which biofuels can be produced that lead to a reduction in CO2 levels . Such as using biochar or other soil building techniques . Obviously cutting down virgin forest to create farmland would be a bad thing , but increasing the productivity of existing farmland would be a good thing .
Using biofuels to run car and aeroplane engines just demostrates how wasteful the internal combustion engine is , and what a waste of valuable biofuel it is to use it for these purposes . We would do better use all the biomass in combined heat and power stations and move to more of an electric driven economy .
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