Are Sustainable Biofuels Even Possible?. By Bradford Plumer, New Republic, July 21, 2009. "The U.S. biofuel industry is slated to receive up to $420 billion in subsidies between now and 2022, yet recent studies have suggested that, when you take indirect land-use effects into account, the two biggest biofuels on the block, corn- and soy-based ethanol, create more greenhouse-gas emissions than old-fashioned gasoline. And farm-staters in Congress have reacted to this shocking news by... arguing that we should ignore indirect land-use effects... So ethanol never lived up to the early hype, and its defenders have acted badly. But a major new study in Science suggests that, despite the broad disillusionment with crop-based ethanol, other types of biofuels can still play a role in the shift away from fossil fuels... Looking at things through this lens, their conclusion was that biofuels can still be produced in large quantities, without having adverse effects on land use or food prices, but only if they're tightly regulated and come from a few specific sources: 1) perennial plants grown on degraded lands abandoned from agricultural use; 2) crop residues; 3) sustainably harvested wood and forest residues; 4) double crops and mixed cropping systems; 5) municipal and industrial wastes."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment