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...Nine billion gallons of corn ethanol were produced in the U.S. in 2008, while countries like 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...
...question is, Are biofuels really green? A pair of new studies in the Oct. 22 issue of Science damningly demonstrate that the answer is no, at least not the way we 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...
...they were 100% carbon neutral, 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...
...with a plantation of palms to make biodiesel. That's where the accounting error crops up: we should assess the carbon lost in deforestation when we measure the greenness of biofuels, but that's not how it works under Kyoto, which simply exempts all CO2 emissions that come from using biofuels. CO2 emissions resulting from deforestation or other changes in the way we use land are not evaluated at all. The result is a huge, if accidental error in the existing global carbon accounting system - and one that now stands to be repeated in the cap-and-trade bill...
...expansion would be large enough to displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover - which would release an additional 9 billion tons of CO2 a year. "Carbon capture and storage, solar power, electric batteries - all of these alternatives have serious costs," says Searchinger. "But if you can just use up the world's carbon in forests to meet your cap, that turns out to be pretty cheap...