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...Brazil have already widely replaced gasoline with ethanol from sugar cane and countless start-ups are working to bring cellulosic and other second-generation biofuels to market. The reasoning is that if we use greener biofuels in place of gasoline, it will significantly enhance our effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions...
...currently create and use them. In the first study, a team of researchers led by Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., projected the effects of a major biofuel expansion over the coming century and found that it could end up increasing global greenhouse-gas emissions instead of reducing them. In the second paper, another team of researchers led by Tim Searchinger of Princeton University uncovered a potentially damaging flaw in the way carbon emissions from bioenergy are calculated under the Kyoto Protocol and in the carbon cap-and-trade bill currently being debated in Congress...
...even though they are clearly not. When ethanol is burned, for instance, it still releases CO2 into the atmosphere. After all, the plants that go to make biofuels are made of carbon, just as oil and other fossil fuels are. Further, the use of biofuels would reduce total greenhouse-gas emissions only if their creation were to increase - or at least not displace - existing plant growth, which naturally takes carbon out of the atmosphere. For example, if the wood chips left over from logging were used to make biofuel, overall greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced, since that wood waste...
...trade system with the same mistake, or if the world agrees to a truly global successor to Kyoto, the blowback could be enormous. As long as biofuels are incorrectly treated as 100% carbon neutral, they'll represent an economical way for companies to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions and comply with a tightening carbon cap. One study estimates that if the world were to meet a 50% "cut" in global greenhouse gases by 2050 under the current calculations, the necessary biofuel-crops expansion would be large enough to displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover - which would release...
...parts per million - a modest goal - we would need more land for biofuel production by the end of the 21st century than is currently used for all food crops. Worse, all the fertilizer needed to grow those bioenergy crops would increase emissions of nitrous oxide, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and water supplies would also be stressed. "We have to think about this very carefully," says Melillo. "We need to have a complete analysis about the unintended consequences of biofuels." (See pictures of the 2008 global food crisis...