Biofuels make climate change worse, scientific study concludes
An article in today’s Independent shed interesting light on the good/bad biofuels debate. A scientific study looked at the carbon dioxide released when land was converted to biofuel production and came to some shocking conclusions.
A cornfield in South Africa
“All the biofuels we use now cause habitat destruction, either directly or indirectly. Global agriculture is already producing food for six billion people. Producing food-based biofuel, too, will require that still more land be converted to agriculture,” said Joe Fargioine of the US Nature Conservancy who was the lead scientist in one of the studies.
The study found that when peat-lands in Indonesia are converted to palm-oil plantations, it would take 423 years to pay off the carbon debt. Cutting down amazonian trees to grow soya beans immediately creates a carbon debt of 319 years. Some production has more indirect effects such as in the US where farmers used to rotate between soyabean and corn crops and now just grow corn for biofuel - the has led to increased production of Soya (to meet the supply deficit) in the Amazon and hence even more trees are lost.
“Such conversions of land to grow corn (maize) and sugarcane for biodiesel, or palm oil and soybean for bioethanol, release between 17 and 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels, the scientists calculated.
One of the choice paragraphs in the report is; “In finding solutions to climate change, we must ensure that the cure is not worse than the disease”.
You can see the full article in the Independent Online here.
