It's not a joke. It's a disgrace.
I don't remember a time when I was especially proud of having a Jewish background. Today, I am ashamed to be associated with somebody who would say something like that.
Way to go, Rabbi Herschel Schachter.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Saturday, March 08, 2008
The dark (green) side of biofuel
In a previous post, I wrote about environmental organizations who oppose the rush for biofuel because of the environmental (not to mention social/economical) costs of planting lots more soy/corn/sugarcane. I now have a better understanding of these costs, and I thought I'd share.
(thanks to Efrat for sending these papers my way)
Before starting, let's just be clear about why biofuels are interesting in the first place. It's not that they burn any cleaner than fossil fuel - whether You put corn ethanol or gasoline in your car, it's still going to stink. The two benefits of biofuels are this:
(1) Biofuels regenerate, whereas fossil fuels will run out at some point (although there's always nearby stocks, like Saturn's moon Titan, right?..).
(2) The plants that we make the biofuel from aborsb the nasty gases from the atmosphere as part of their daily routine, and help offset their contribution to global warming and related evil.
Okay, now that we have this down, let's take another look at the challenges of generating more biofuel.
In two papers published in Science (here's one, here's the other), the authors explain that in order to convert land to grow soy/corn/sugarcane (sources of biofuel), the land has to be cleared and prepared for agriculture. The assumption is that these areas were not used for agriculture before, but were rainforest, or grasslands, etc.
In the process of preparing the area, the current occupants (trees, bushes, trees) are cut down and/or burned, and this causes enormous release of CO2 and other Green House Gases (GHG) - exactly the kind of stuff we're trying to avoid releasing from cars, for example.
The decaying plants and the ground itself continue to release these gases for quite some time (most of the gases are released over the first 50 years). So the clearing of the land made things worse, environmentally, by releasing all these gases.
Aha, but we now have biofuel to use, instead of fossil-based fuel, which means we're causing less pollution - and that more then compensates for the gases released by the ground clearing, right?
Well, almost. Eventually, the amoung of CO2 and GHG that we're not releasing into the air will compensate for the CO2 and GHG we released into the air when getting ready to grow the soy/corn/sugarcane - but this can take anywhere from 90-820 years, according to the one of the papers.
So preparing land to grow soy/corn/sugarcane would create an enormous carbon debt, that would take a long time to pay back - and in the meantime, lots more CO2 and GHG in the atmosphere. It would eventually be worth it - but that's a far away "eventually."
The authors aren't complete party-poopers, though. They say that it would make total sense to plant more soy/corn/sugarcane, if the planting was done in places that don't store so much CO2 and other GHG. In their words:
"[producing biofuel on] degraded cropland and from waste biomass degraded cropland and from waste biomass would minimize habitat destruction, competition with food production, and carbon debts, all of which are associated with direct and indirect land clearing for biofuel production. "
Personally, I wonder if there's a way that ground can be cleared without releasing so much CO2. Alternatively, what if we relied more on other alternative fuel sources (solar/wind/hydrogen/nuclear) and planted lots of plants especially for the purpose of absorbing atmospheric CO2 - "super absorbers" that could help clean the air?
Okay, time to bike off to buy me some shoes. :-)
(thanks to Efrat for sending these papers my way)
Before starting, let's just be clear about why biofuels are interesting in the first place. It's not that they burn any cleaner than fossil fuel - whether You put corn ethanol or gasoline in your car, it's still going to stink. The two benefits of biofuels are this:
(1) Biofuels regenerate, whereas fossil fuels will run out at some point (although there's always nearby stocks, like Saturn's moon Titan, right?..).
(2) The plants that we make the biofuel from aborsb the nasty gases from the atmosphere as part of their daily routine, and help offset their contribution to global warming and related evil.
Okay, now that we have this down, let's take another look at the challenges of generating more biofuel.
In two papers published in Science (here's one, here's the other), the authors explain that in order to convert land to grow soy/corn/sugarcane (sources of biofuel), the land has to be cleared and prepared for agriculture. The assumption is that these areas were not used for agriculture before, but were rainforest, or grasslands, etc.
In the process of preparing the area, the current occupants (trees, bushes, trees) are cut down and/or burned, and this causes enormous release of CO2 and other Green House Gases (GHG) - exactly the kind of stuff we're trying to avoid releasing from cars, for example.
The decaying plants and the ground itself continue to release these gases for quite some time (most of the gases are released over the first 50 years). So the clearing of the land made things worse, environmentally, by releasing all these gases.
Aha, but we now have biofuel to use, instead of fossil-based fuel, which means we're causing less pollution - and that more then compensates for the gases released by the ground clearing, right?
Well, almost. Eventually, the amoung of CO2 and GHG that we're not releasing into the air will compensate for the CO2 and GHG we released into the air when getting ready to grow the soy/corn/sugarcane - but this can take anywhere from 90-820 years, according to the one of the papers.
So preparing land to grow soy/corn/sugarcane would create an enormous carbon debt, that would take a long time to pay back - and in the meantime, lots more CO2 and GHG in the atmosphere. It would eventually be worth it - but that's a far away "eventually."
The authors aren't complete party-poopers, though. They say that it would make total sense to plant more soy/corn/sugarcane, if the planting was done in places that don't store so much CO2 and other GHG. In their words:
"[producing biofuel on] degraded cropland and from waste biomass degraded cropland and from waste biomass would minimize habitat destruction, competition with food production, and carbon debts, all of which are associated with direct and indirect land clearing for biofuel production. "
Personally, I wonder if there's a way that ground can be cleared without releasing so much CO2. Alternatively, what if we relied more on other alternative fuel sources (solar/wind/hydrogen/nuclear) and planted lots of plants especially for the purpose of absorbing atmospheric CO2 - "super absorbers" that could help clean the air?
Okay, time to bike off to buy me some shoes. :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)