Biofuels are not the answer

Biofuels can perhaps play a limited role, they are not the answer. Just imagine what new ideas and new starts we could have had if we dropped $1.5 trillion into new energy instead of invading Iraq. Of course, the special interests who put the GOP in power wouldn't like it, but the rest of us would have. When Bush tried jumping on the sugar cane biofuel bandwagon in Brazil, that should have provided enough warning that this was not the long term answer. We need to be looking at the complete picture and not just one benefit, such as reduced emissions. More on biofuels, after the jump.

Efforts to work out which crops are most environmentally friendly have, until now, focused only on the amount of greenhouse gases a fuel emits when it is burned. Scharlemann and Laurance highlighted a more comprehensive method, developed by Rainer Zah of the Empa Research Institute in Switzerland, that can take total environmental impacts - such as loss of forests and farmland and effects on biodiversity - into account.

In a study of 26 biofuels the Swiss method showed that 21 fuels reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 30% compared with gasoline when burned. But almost half of the biofuels, a total of 12, had greater total environmental impacts than fossil fuels. These included economically-significant fuels such as US corn ethanol, Brazilian sugar cane ethanol and soy diesel, and Malaysian palm-oil diesel. Biofuels that fared best were those produced from waste products such as recycled cooking oil, as well as ethanol from grass or wood.

Scharlemann and Laurance also pointed to "perverse" government initiatives that had resulted in unintended environmental impacts. In the US, for example, farmers have been offered incentives to shift from growing soy to growing corn for biofuels. "This is helping to drive up global soy prices, which in turn amplifies economic incentives to destroy Amazonian forests and Brazilian tropical savannas for soy production."