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In this week’s Science: Fixing a major flaw with biofuels

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

There’s an interesting article in Friday’s issue of Science by a team of ecologists and environmental scientists arguing that the way we think about biofuels is flawed and can potentially lead to bad outcomes in mitigating climate change.

Here’ s the issue:  When we think of using, say, wood from forests or grasses from grasslands for energy, we normally think of this process as being carbon neutral–i.e., the carbon released when we burn the wood/grass will be taken back up by the regenerating forest/grassland.  No net change in atmospheric CO₂.  At face value, this sounds like a great strategy for dealing with atmospheric CO₂.

However, the authors indicate that the carbon accounting system in the Kyoto protocol, EU carbon trading system, and developing U.S. cap and trade plans makes a mistake in how biofuels are handled.  Specifically, because of the carbon neutrality of biofuels, the carbon accounting system simply ignores (1) the release of carbon to the atmosphere from biofuel burning and (2) the movement of carbon from the atmosphere back into regenerating forests and grasslands (or other biofuel crop).  At first glance, this appears to make sense: If burning biofuels is carbon neutral, just ignore the release and uptake of carbon since they cancel one another out.

There are two major problems with this–one ecological and another economic:

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Tags: biofuel, carbon neutral
Posted in biofuels, climate change science | 2 Comments »