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Does canola biodiesel help or hurt climate?
Scott Learn, Oregonian
Last year, four Canadian researchers said that swapping canola-based biodiesel from Canada for petroleum diesel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85 percent.
Their conclusion: The biofuel’s environmental benefits are “overwhelming.”
This summer, four different researchers said producing biodiesel from the fertilizer-heavy crop would generate up to 70 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than using regular diesel.
…But the science on canola biodiesel is far from clear.
The main problem is that canola takes a lot of nitrogen fertilizer to grow. Soil microbes react with the fertilizer, causing some of the nitrogen to convert to nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that traps 300 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The debate is over how big that portion is. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that, in general, about 1 percent of the fertilizer applied to the crop converts to nitrous oxide.
But this summer, a group of researchers headed by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, said that number is “severely underestimated” and should be more like 3 percent to 5 percent.
That was bad news for canola biodiesel.
At best, the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions using canola biodiesel instead of petroleum diesel would offset the nitrous oxide emissions from the fertilizer. At worst, the nitrous oxide would push emissions 70 percent higher.
(21 October 2007)
Victims of the ethanol rush: Loss of the native prairie
Leonard Doyle, Independent
The Great Plains of Kansas are being transformed by America’s thirst for alternative fuels. Some are calling it an ecological disaster.
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Beaumont, (pop 286, 70% Rep, 30% Dem,) is a town so tucked away in the Flint hills of Kansas that it boasts its own fly-in hotel.
It is way off the beaten track, far from the bustle of the Interstates, the four-lane arteries that slice through the Great Plains. It was here that I met Pete Ferrell, a rebel rancher burning with anger at the way he says American agriculture is being subverted to the detriment of the planet.
And now almost unnoticed by urban America, one of the great ecological disasters of modern times is unfolding as an ethanol-fuelled gold rush engulfs the Great Plains and risks destroying what is left of North America’s most endangered ecosystem, the native prairie. The last 35 million acres of prairie, deliberately left alone to preserve a precious ecology, is being ploughed up to produce ethanol from corn.
(19 October 2007)
Biofuels – Great Green Hope or Swindle
Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service
BROOKLIN, Canada – A raft of new studies reveal European and American multibillion dollar support for biofuels is unsustainable, environmentally destructive and much more about subsidising agri-business corporations than combating global warming.1020 05
Not only do most forms of biofuel production do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, growing biofuel crops uses up precious water resources, increasing the size and extent of dead zones in the oceans, boosting use of toxic pesticides and deforestation in tropical countries, such studies say.
And biofuel, powered by billions of dollars in government subsidies, will drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020, predicts the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
“Fuel made from food is a dumb idea to put it succinctly,” says Ronald Steenblik, research director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Biofuel production in the U.S. and Europe is just another way of subsidising big agri-business corporations, Steenblik told IPS.
“It’s (biofuel) also a distraction from dealing with the real problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he asserts.
Making fuel out of corn, soy, oilseeds and sugar crops is also incredibly expensive, Steenblik and his co-authors document in two new reports on the U.S. and the European Union that are part of a series titled ‘Biofuels at What Cost? Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel’.
(20 October 2007)
Simmons on biofuels: Can we end our addiction to oil? (PDF)
Matthew Simmons, Simmons International
Slides to accompany a talk given at the UKTI and GHP Biofuels Conference.
(15 October 2007)
