Can't help but respond.
The article develops an argument for its conclusion (& title) from
the following statement:
“Some organizations have advocated for a bioenergy target of meeting
20 percent of the world’s total energy demand by the year 2050 ...."
"Some organizations ...." ?????
(Kind of like "I heard somewhere ....")
Understand the problem this would present even for the most
enthusiastic supporter of biofuels.
- In 2008 the world used ~143,851 TWh (~485,715 Quadrillion BTU's)
of energy. By 2012 this increased by ~4% while the population
increased by roughly 5%. Interesting that population increased faster
than energy use.
(Kudos to energy efficiency/conservation).
At the same time, the very energy sources the author favors over
biofuels
(ex: solar) have increased at a faster rate than the non-renewables
that
biofuels are intended to replace. Is it fair to assume that this
enthusiasm for energy generated by solar, wind, water will continue?
If so, it would be silly for any organization to advocate for
biofuels composing 20% of total energy consumption while the very
sources that biofuels can replace (fossil fuels) are making up less
and less of the total energy picture.
Add to this: Transportation made up 27.3% (26,740 TWh) of the
total
world energy consumption in 2008. It is here, in transportation, that
biofuels can have the greatest impact, however, it is in the
transportation segment that the % of energy demand, compared to
the entire energy picture, decreased, though slightly, from 2000.
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute,
proposes, in his book "The Age of Sustainable Development" (2015),
sustainable solutions to climate change including electric cars
powered
by sustainable sources such as solar, rather than internal combustion
vehicles.
Sounds sensible to me.
Note: Global stock of PEV's on the road rose from 100,000 in 2011 to
180,000 in 2012, to 405,000 in 2013. This increase in sales far
surpasses
overall increases in auto sales in general. U.S. sales of electric
vehicles
rose by more than 70% from 2013 to 2014.
***The very sector that provides the best opportunity for biofuels is,
itself,
moving away from the energy dense liquid fuels that biofuels are
intended to
replace.
To meet a 20 percent biofuels target by 2050, Searchinger writes,
“humanity would need to at least double the world’s annual harvest of
plant material in all its forms. Those increases would have to come on
top of the already large increases needed to meet growing food and
timber needs. Even assuming large increases in efficiency, the quest
for bioenergy at a meaningful scale is both unrealistic and
unsustainable.”
Does the author think we are morons? (no offense to morons)
If that 20% seems to come from somewhere, it is a number used
by many municipalities as a goal for % of biofuels used by municipal
vehicles.
It is part of overall sustainability goals.
It is also part of the goal of many countries to move toward
decreased fossil
fuel use in vehicles by increasing biofuel use.
NOT 20% of overall energy demand
20% is also the level of BD that many manufacturers approve for
use in
their vehicles.
(Manufacturers of gasoline vehicles approve E10 (10% ethanol) and
flex fuel
vehicles can use E100 although it can be difficult to find E85 (85%
ethanol/15% gasoline).
Tom
On Sun, 01 Mar 2015 16:32:27 -0500
Darryl McMahon <dar...@econogics.com> wrote:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1267061-biofuels-hurting-environment-more-than-helping/
[The WRI 'study' that just won't die. Kind of like the claims that
the Keystone XL pipeline would create over 40,000 full-time jobs in
the U.S. (reality bite: that's actually 35 permanent full-time jobs
in the U.S. - 2-digit number, no trailing zeroes.)]
Biofuels Hurting Environment, More Than Helping
By Mike Gaworecki
February 28, 2015
A new report from the World Resources Institute finds that dedicating
land to the production of biofuels, a form of renewable energy made
from plants, may undermine efforts to achieve a sustainable food
future, combat climate change, and protect forests.
The global population hit seven billion in 2011 and is expected to
grow to nine billion in 2050. Feeding all those people without
chopping down forests for agriculture and livestock will already be a
difficult task, according to Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at WRI
who wrote the report. Dedicating land to the production of bioenergy
crops will make it much harder.
“The bottom line is, the world only has so much land, and we are
going to struggle to produce all the additional food we need by 2050
without cutting down more forests,” Searchinger told mongabay.com.
“And if you add bioenergy to that it makes it virtually impossible.”
The problem, of course, is that if you dedicate land to growing crops
like sugarcane, corn, soybeans, or wood solely for the production of
biofuels, you can’t use that land to grow food–or as a carbon sink. We
already use a whopping three-fourths of the world’s vegetated land for
crops, livestock grazing, and wood harvests, according to the WRI
paper. And the remaining land really should be left as is, since it
protects clean water, supports biodiversity, and stores carbon.
The cost-benefit analysis simply doesn’t work out in bioenergy’s
favor, according to the report. Making ethanol from Brazilian
sugarcane, for instance, only converts around 0.2 percent of the sun’s
energy. The standard solar cells on the market today, by contrast, are
capable of generating as much as 100 times more energy per acre as
biofuels. And as the report points out, unlike biofuels, solar panels
work great in places where they aren’t in direct competition with food
crops or forests, such as desserts and rooftops.
Meanwhile, food for the ever-expanding global population will need to
be grown somewhere, and if we’re to avert runaway global warming we
need the world’s forests to be sequestering as much carbon as
possible. But one 2010 study found that the Amazon rainforest was
likely to suffer due to Brazil’s ambitious biofuel goals. While that
study found that little forest land would be directly converted to
growing biofuel feedstocks, the displacement of cattle ranching, one
of the main uses of land in Brazil, to other forest areas by bioenergy
production would have a hefty impact on the Amazon.
What Searchinger has found is that, essentially, global targets for
increased use of biofuels could lead to the same problem occurring in
forests around the globe.
“Some organizations have advocated for a bioenergy target of meeting
20 percent of the world’s total energy demand by the year 2050, which
would require around 225 exajoules of energy in biomass per year,” the
report states. “That amount, however, is roughly equivalent to the
total amount of biomass people harvest today—all the crops, plant
residues, and trees harvested by people for food, timber, and other
uses, plus all the grass consumed by livestock around the world.”
To meet a 20 percent biofuels target by 2050, Searchinger writes,
“humanity would need to at least double the world’s annual harvest of
plant material in all its forms. Those increases would have to come on
top of the already large increases needed to meet growing food and
timber needs. Even assuming large increases in efficiency, the quest
for bioenergy at a meaningful scale is both unrealistic and
unsustainable.”
What about the direct climate benefits of using more biofuels?
Proponents argue that biofuels reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but
the WRI report finds that conclusion to be based on faulty logic.
“Studies that find bioenergy reduces greenhouse gases incorrectly
view plants as a carbon-free fuel and ignore the very real carbon
emitted by burning them,” Searchinger wrote in a blog post about his
report. “The theory has been that the original growth of the plants
absorbs enough carbon to offset the carbon released when they burn.
But if those plants were going to grow and absorb carbon anyway – and
typically they would – then diverting them to bioenergy does not
remove any additional carbon from the atmosphere. Instead, bioenergy
comes at the expense of some other uses of those plants. When the
expense is food or agricultural land, the effect is poorer nutrition.
When the expense is forests or woody savannas, the effect is less
stored carbon.”
Not all sources of bioenergy are problematic. Searchinger says that
municipal waste and forest and crop residues such as sawdust and corn
stalks, which do not require a dedicated use of land, have potential
to be part of the solution to the climate crisis, but only in limited
amounts, because there are limited quantities of these biomass sources
to begin with.
One of the biggest threats to forests from biofuels, Searchinger
says, is that forests are being chopped down to feed power plants.
Europe, in particular, has been aggressively using wood pellets
supplied by American companies to displace coal in power plants.
Though the companies supplying the pellets say they are harvesting the
wood in a sustainable manner, environmentalists are weary, and have
been calling on the European Union to reconsider. Even in the
best-case scenario, the use of wood pellets still results in a net
gain in carbon emissions, as it will take decades for the trees they
came from to regrow.
But ultimately, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
determine how much expanded production of biofuels might have
contributed to global deforestation, let alone to project how future
biofuels targets might lead to the destruction of even more forests.
“Since we started expanding biofuels, cropping area has grown at a
much more rapid rate,” Searchinger says. “And how much that is
effecting forests, we don’t really know.”
Citations:
Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A.
Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R.
Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice, and J. R.
G. Townshend. 2013. “Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA Tree Cover Loss and
Gain Area.” University of Maryland, Google, USGS, and NASA. Accessed
through Global Forest Watch on Feb. 27, 2015.
www.globalforestwatch.org.
Greenpeace, University of Maryland, World Resources Institute and
Transparent World. 2014. Intact Forest Landscapes: update and
degradation from 2000-2013. Accessed through Global Forest Watch on
Feb. 27, 2015. www.globalforestwatch.org
Lapola, D. M., Schaldach, R., Alcamo, J., Bondeau, A., Koch, J.,
Koelking, C., & Priess, J. A. (2010). Indirect land-use changes can
overcome carbon savings from biofuels in Brazil. Proceedings of the
national Academy of Sciences, 107(8), 3388-3393.
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