Word: indirectly
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Although such actions, even if successful, would play no direct part in ridding North Korea of its nuclear arsenal, they could play an indirect role. The weapons trade "has been a main source of revenue for the North for quite some time," Morrell said. Choking it off, he said, would reduce funding for Pyongyang's nuclear program as well as halt the proliferation of arms to other countries and terrorists, "where it could pose a threat to us and our allies...
...real problem with farm fuels, as Searchinger and others have shown, is in the indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food. And that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon. So farm fuels become a lose-lose deal: exacerbating the deforestation that already creates one fifth of the world's carbon emissions, and driving up global food prices. (See pictures of the global...
...huge biofuels mandate in its 2007 energy bill, throwing a bone to environmentalists who were freaking out that the alternative fuels they had championed for years were in fact ecological calamities. The law - supported by then-Senator Barack Obama - required life-cycle analyses that would calculate direct and indirect emissions...
...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...
Still, the ethanol industry's days may be numbered. Ethanol wouldn't exist but for government subsidies, yet in the 2007 energy bill, Congress ruled that to be eligible for support, corn ethanol has to emit 20% less climate pollution than gasoline. If you include the indirect land-use effects of ethanol - the increase in deforestation caused by using land to grow fuel - it's unlikely to hit that target. On May 5, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed rule that would take into account indirect land-use effects when judging just how green corn ethanol is. Unless...