Word: epa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard to see how. Earlier studies exposed corn ethanol as a carbon catastrophe; the EPA had to use extremely generous assumptions to produce scenarios in which it's even remotely attractive as a fuel alternative. In any case, the heavily subsidized corn-ethanol industries won't really be penalized for promoting deforestation and accelerating global warming; Congress exempted its existing plants from any consequences in the 2007 law requiring the stress tests. At her May 5 news conference with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Jackson suggested this was a good thing, because corn ethanol...
...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 by 11%. If those draft conclusions become final, they will commit the U.S. to an additional 21 billion gallons of biofuels...
...Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger, who helped launch a global rethinking of biofuels in 2007 by calling attention to their effects on land use, warns that the EPA assumptions are extremely optimistic - and that if they're wrong the consequences could be extremely dire. "It takes a lot of land to make a small amount of energy," Searchinger says. "Academic studies have concluded that if the world gets even 10% of its energy from these new kinds of crops, most tropical forests will probably disappear." (Read "The Clean Energy Scam...
...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...