Word: carbonations
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Maybe it was simply too good to be true. For proponents, biofuels - petroleum substitutes made from plant matter like corn or sugar cane - seemed to promise everything. Using biofuels rather than oil would reduce the greenhouse gases that accelerate global warming, because plants absorb carbon dioxide when they grow, balancing out the carbon released when burned in cars or trucks. Using homegrown biofuels would help the U.S. reduce its utter dependence on foreign oil, and provide needed income for rural farmers around the world. And unlike cars powered purely by electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells - two alternate technologies that...
...fuels they're meant to supplement. According to researchers at Princeton University and the Nature Conservancy, almost all the biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels, if the full environmental cost of producing them is factored in. As virgin land is converted for growing biofuels, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere; at the same time, biofuel crops themselves are much less effective at absorbing carbon than the natural forests or grasslands they may be replacing. "When land is converted from natural ecosystems it releases carbon," says Joseph Fargione, a lead author...
Many environmentalists have been making the case against biofuels for some time, arguing that biofuel production takes valuable agricultural land away from food, driving up the price of staple crops like corn. But the Science papers make a more sweeping argument. In their paper, Fargione's team calculated the "carbon debt" created by raising biofuel crops - the amount of carbon released in the process of converting natural landscapes into cropland. They found that corn ethanol produced in the U.S. had a carbon debt of 93 years, meaning it would take nearly a century for ethanol, which does produce fewer greenhouse...
Worse, as demand for biofuels go up - the European Union alone targets 5.75% of all its transport fuel to come from biofuel by the end of the year - the price of crops rises. That in turn encourages farmers to clear virgin land and plant more crops, releasing even more carbon in a vicious cycle. For instance, as the U.S. uses more biodiesel, much of which is made from soybeans or palm oil, farmers in Brazil or Indonesia will clear more land to raise soybeans to replace those used for fuel. "When we ask the world's farmers to feed...
...zone, so will be expected to pay $50 every time I take the car out of the garage on a weekday. That's almost the cost of a minicab journey to Heathrow. Or a pizza dinner. I'll have to swap the Mercedes for a new car and my carbon footprint will get bigger. "If you hardly drive it, that's a really good point," she says. "There are people like you, but hopefully not too many. People with very old, well-looked-after Mercedes are probably not the target of this, but we have to put the measures...