From yesterday’s Boston Globe comes an op-ed on the need for sound accounting guidelines when it comes to bioenergy and greenhouse gas emissions:
The problem: treaties and laws now treat all forms of bioenergy as carbon neutral and therefore completely non-polluting. In reality, how much bioenergy reduces greenhouse gases depends on the source of the plant material. The right rules will encourage the development of fast-growing grasses and trees that can greatly increase the amount of carbon absorbed by plants on marginal land and thereby reduce global warming. The wrong rules will encourage clearing of forests, which releases carbon dioxide and may even increase greenhouse gases while also threatening biodiversity.
[…]
[T]he climate bill working its way through Congress shares this error.
If the error continues globally, it gives oil firms or electric utilities that must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions a false incentive to switch to those forms of bioenergy that result from clearing forests. Several studies predict they will do so on a large scale. By contrast, the right accounting will give entrepreneurs the incentive to commercialize the great technical innovations in generating more carbon from the earth’s land and converting it efficiently into useable fuel.
The op-ed was co-written by Vinod Khosla and Tim Searchinger, both big names in biofuels, for different reasons. Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, is a big investor in bioenergy.
Searchinger, meanwhile, is known as a skeptic of biofuels. In 2008, he co-authored a study that found that, taking into account the conversion of forest and grassland into new cropland (as grain is diverted to biofuel production), biofuels actually increase greenhouse gas emissions. More recently, he co-authored a paper in the journal Science that looked into the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and U.S. climate legislation to account for emissions from biofuels.
The op-ed finds common ground in recognizing the promise of bioenergy, even as it calls for a more informed approach to its role in the global energy picture. All too often, the prefix “bio” lulls people into a false sense of enviro-comfort. But as Khosla and Searchinger suggest, if the biofuel you’re putting into your car came from crops planted on — or that eventually led to — a cleared forest, then chances are you’re not helping the climate much at all.
It may seem an obscure area of cap-and-trade, but the op-ed actually underscores the importance of rigorous research and strict accounting in developing a climate bill. Khosla and Searchinger urge policy makers working on cap-and-trade to distinguish bioenergy by its source and production process. The last thing we need is a climate bill that ends up wiping out swathes of forestland, all because of that misleading prefix.
(h/t to NRDC’s Switchboard blog)
