Word: cornes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fairness, corn ethanol was already pretty much a done deal; Congress demanded 15 billion gallons in annual production by 2022, and the industry is already almost there. That is why the real stress tests that mattered were the ones concerning biofuels of the future like cellulosic ethanol grown from switchgrass - which has not been proven commercially viable but has been hailed as a kind of magic weed. Once again, the EPA used rosy life-cycle assumptions to conclude that next-generation biofuels will reduce billions of tons of emissions over the next century, ultimately reducing our oil consumption...
...carbon-intense fossil fuels while boosting demand for American farm products. And they're "renewable," which has become a kind of synonym for green. But years ago, researchers began raising concerns about the direct emissions created by the heavy machinery and petroleum-based fertilizers it takes to grow corn and other biofuel feedstocks, the energy-intensive plants that convert the crops into fuel and the trucks that transport the fuel to market. A slew of studies have concluded that when you include all these life-cycle emissions, corn ethanol only produces about 20% fewer emissions than gasoline, although cellulosic ethanol...
...renewable-fuels lobby thinks the EPA should just ignore the indirect emissions, because they're hard to calculate. But Searchinger points out several ways the EPA gave biofuels the benefit of the doubt. Its analysis of direct emissions gave corn ethanol an advantage over gasoline nearly three times larger than most previous studies; it gave cellulosic ethanol savings 50% higher than nearly all other studies. It based most of its numbers not on what farmers and ethanol producers do now but on what it hopes they will do in 2022, assuming dramatic increases in crop yields and energy efficiency...
...starkest example of the problems with the analysis is the time horizon. When the EPA studied a reasonable 30-year time period, even with its generous assumptions, soy biodiesel and corn-ethanol plants powered by coal or natural gas actually produced more emissions than gasoline; corn ethanol only passed the stress test (and just barely) when powered by the cleanest possible power. And that analysis assumed it's a good trade-off to accept massive emissions today in exchange for reductions over 30 years, when in fact massive emissions today could help trigger devastating ice melts and other feedback loops...
...also studied a 100-year time horizon, which makes the numbers look a bit better for corn and soy, but makes no sense: Who knows if we're going to use biofuels or gas or even automobiles for the next 100 years? Scientists believe we need to reduce our emissions 80% by 2050 to avoid catastrophe; the notion that we should tear down our rain forests and peatlands today in the hope that our cars will burn a bit cleaner a century from now is political analysis, not environmental analysis. "That's something we'll have to take into account...