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Top scientists warn against rush to biofuel
James Randerson and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian
Brown plans to resist EU plans for increased quotas as doubts multiply
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Gordon Brown is preparing for a battle with the European Union over biofuels after one of the government’s leading scientists warned they could exacerbate climate change rather than combat it.
In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.
“If one started to use biofuels … and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane,” Watson said. “It would certainly be a perverse outcome.”
(25 March 2008)
Related from the Guardian: Biofuels: a solution that became part of the problem.
The Folly of Turning Water into Fuel
Stan Cox, AlterNet
Agribusiness and politicians are sucking our country dry with mandates for biofuels.
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… For once, times are good in the High Plains. Corn and other grains are selling like precious metals, and there is every reason to believe that prices will stay high. At the heart of the boom is the U.S. government’s decision to rely on corn-based ethanol to meet a big part of the nation’s demand for “renewable” fuels.
Most recent controversy over ethanol has focused on the its poor energy return; in growing corn and turning it into ethanol, you have to burn three calories to get four. With prices of fuel and other inputs rising fast, corn farmers won’t be getting rich (except for those who happen to have oil wells on their property.) But selling their corn for such high prices, they can afford to sow more acres and burn more propane, diesel or electricity to pump more water than ever. A torrent of cash will be flowing through the nation’s corn-growing regions, but the biggest price will be paid in water.
To hear agribusiness boosters and politicians tell it, corn-based ethanol is a miraculous solution to the nation’s hunger for liquid fuels. But as miracles go, it’s not all that impressive. When Jesus, according to Biblical reports, converted approximately 150 gallons of water into an equivalent quantity of wine, his conversion rate was about a cup of ethanol per gallon of water invested (given the typical alcohol content of wine). Compare that to current processes that use irrigated corn as their carbon source and get less than a teaspoon of ethanol for each gallon of water consumed.
In dry areas of the High Plains where irrigation is the most crucial to corn production and the ethanol-to-water ratio even lower, agriculture is dependent on a one-time drawing of groundwater that hasn’t seen daylight for 11,000 years or more. The vast Ogallala aquifer, stretching from not far south of Steve Albracht’s Texas farm all the way up into South Dakota, is being mined at a rate that, in some areas, will drain it sometime in the relatively near future — at least before the oil wells of the Persian Gulf run dry.
(22 March 2008)
