Can’t See the Forest for the Biofuels

According to a new study, cutting down forests to grow crops for fuel causes more environmental damage than using biofuels can ever offset.

It’s a sobering message at a time when energy crops, once a hippie dream, have gone mainstream green. Around the world, governments and industries have pledged to replace climate-fouling fossil fuels with fuel made from plants. But is it possible that we can’t see the CO2 forest for the trees?
Writing in the journal Science, Renton Righelato of the World Land Trust, a British conservation group, and Dominick Spracklen, an environmental researcher at the University of Leeds, compared the carbon dioxide savings offered by using land for biofuel crops or forests.

The worst practice for the environment, they found, is making space for biofuel crops by clearing forests. Inevitably, forests absorb more CO2 than is saved by biofuel crops grown where they once stood.

“People feel they’re saving the planet. They’re not. The real issue we should be concerned with is reducing consumption and improving fuel efficiency,” said Righelato. “Biofuels are essentially being used as a way of avoiding the real problem: reducing the use of fossil fuels.”

Biofuel demand from places like Europe and North America has prompted deforestation in the developing world.

The European Union has pledged to replace 20 percent of transport fuels with biofuels by 2020. By that time, the United States plans on using biofuels for about 15 percent of transportation power.

To meet those goals with today’s technologies, half of US and EU food crop land would be devoted to energy crops, estimates the International Energy Authority. That’s not about to happen, so the demand is being displaced onto the developing world — with potentially disastrous results.

Wired