By Bruce Dale, Wednesday, November 26, 2008, The Washington Times
As the Environmental Protection Agency fulfills its requirement to determine how direct and indirect land use change is impacted by crops produced to make biofuels, it needs to assure that good science is used to create good policy.
It would be easy - and wrong - to rely on a much-publicized study that connects U.S. corn ethanol production to greenhouse gas release via indirect land use change. Indirect land use change refers to bringing new lands into agricultural production, and thereby creating a “carbon debt,” because of market forces.
This study, first publicized in ScienceExpress online in February 2008 and widely quoted in a Time magazine cover story in March, cast a pall over all biofuels and has chilled investment in advanced non-grain-based biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol. My evaluation is that the study meets neither the standards for scientific significance nor life cycle analysis as required in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007.
No actual data exist that connect U.S. domestic ethanol production with, to cite a widely quoted example, the clearing of the Amazon rain forest. Instead, the paper’s conclusions depend entirely on economic modeling and assumptions. The validity of these assumptions and the reliability of the models are now being explored by other scientists.
Thus far, the paper is not holding up well to scrutiny. For example, other analyses predict that hypothetical land use change will occur primarily in U.S. grasslands and commercial forests, not in tropical forests. The “carbon debt” resulting from grassland conversion is much less than what would result from tropical forest conversion. (Read the full article here)
