BIOMASS HUB

The biofuels debate has taken a difficult turn in recent months.  With the European Commission the target of a lawsuit and mired in controversy over proposed biofuel sustainability standards, the U.S. struggling to strike a balance between GHG emissions mitigation and quantifying indirect land use change, and an uptick in concern for neocolonialism linked to biofuels (in Latin America and Africa), the industry sorely needs a public relations makeover.

The issue can be traced back to a carbon accounting error, which led to legislation allowing biomass to be treated as carbon neutral even when new lands are cultivated to grow energy crops.

A paper published in the journal Science in 2009 argues, that by failing to take into account the larger ecological impacts of biofuels production, scientists allowed governments to present biofuels as better for the world’s climate and environment than they actually are.

The Washington Post reports:

When calculating the greenhouse-gas emissions limit, government officials in the United States, Europe and elsewhere do not count the carbon that biofuels release when they are burned. But carbon is released when a producer clears and burns trees, even to grow a crop destined for the biofuels market. Officials also established a legal system that limits emissions from energy use but not from land-use activities such as clearing forests.

Timothy D. Searchinger, the paper’s lead author and a Princeton University research scholar, said it is urgent that officials correct the accounting issue before these incentives make the less environmentally friendly forms of bioenergy more entrenched:

You think it’s hard to solve now?  If you don’t solve it now, it just doesn’t get solved.

Co-author of the paper, Steven P. Hamburg of the Environmental Defense Fund, states:

We made an honest mistake within the scientific framing of the debate, and we’ve got to correct it to make it right.

The EPA’s RFS2 was a key first attempt to “right the course,” but succumbed somewhat to key ethanol lobby groups.  These groups, including the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) and Growth Energy, have slapped the State of California with a lawsuit challenging its low carbon fuel standard, which attempts to quantify the carbon impact of different fuel pathways.

For more on the carbon accounting issues, check out this post from NRDC’s switchboard.

Image: Flickr/Fernando Stankuns