Weekly Biofuels and Climate Change Blog Round Up

This week in the blogosphere in Industrial & Environmental Technology we start off with NASCAR. Yes that’s right NASCAR . Domestic Fuel.com quotes an article in USA Today about NASCAR,
“The concept might seem incongruous in a sport inherently tied to an internal combustion engine that many find synonymous with global warming, but [...]

All Your Eggs in One Basket

Biofuels Digest reported this week that DoE Secretary Chu told attendees of an alternative energy conference, “If it were up to me, I would put every cent into electric cars.”
The following day, Biofuels Digest reported its own lifecycle analysis of E85 from corn and the Tesla electric car. According to the report, “cars running on [...]

Corn Growers Try to Understand Indirect Land Use Change

The National Corn Growers Association’s recent “Land Use: Carbon Impacts of Corn Based Ethanol 2009” conference highlighted the confusion the issue of indirect land use change has engendered for farmers. Chuck Zimmerman of AgWired summed it up in a report from the conference:
Do you understand things like indirect land use when it comes to regulations [...]

Environmentalists Want to “Stick” It to Farmers

Jason Hill of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment wrote recently in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, asking why the Waxman-Markey climate change bill should treat agricultural emissions differently from energy and transportation emissions, with a “carrot-and-stick approach, one in which fossil fuels suffer the stick while agriculture feasts upon the carrot.” Hill’s [...]

Data Also Disproves Food v. Fuel Claims

The Wall Street Journal’s Scott Kilman reported earlier this week on a letter sent by General Mills, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Kraft Foods to Ag. Sec. Tom Vilsack, asking for reduction of trade tariffs on sugar. From Kilman’s article and the letter, it’s clear that grocery manufacturers are once again trying to distract public [...]

Indirect Land Use Paradigm Change

A recent analysis by Iowa State University Biofuels Economist Robert Wisner argues that requirements for biofuel production are on a collision course with greenhouse gas reduction goals. He notes that the Energy Independence and Security Act’s requirement for gradual increases in production of biofuels “was designed to provide time for technology development and industry growth.” [...]

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

The EPA has released its long-awaited proposed rules for the Renewable Fuel Standard, including calculations of the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions for various biofuels. Unlike California, the EPA is proposing to “discount” the greenhouse gas emissions of both biofuels and the baseline petroleum gasoline. The discount rate that EPA uses for most of the calculations [...]

A Bad Rule Is Better Than No Rule?

California’s Air Resources Board will vote Thursday on its proposed numbers for the life cycle emissions of various fuels, included under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.
According to a Greenwire story picked up in the New York Times, advocates of the rule believe that it will stimulate investment in advanced biofuels, since according to the [...]

Ethanol or Tar Sands?

Those who are pushing the inclusion of indirect land use change (ILUC) in government regulations have thus far proposed ILUC as the only indirect effect and that it only apply to biofuels. A letter from more than 100 scientists pointed out this would create unequal boundaries for transportation fuels and unfairly disadvantage biofuels.
But are there [...]

California Proposes Numbers for Indirect Land Use Change Emissions

California issued a staff report last week for its “Proposed Regulation to Implement the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.” As expected, the rule proposes a measure of indirect land use change emissions for select biofuels – corn and sugarcane ethanol and soy biodiesel. The report defines the assumptions behind the analysis – in a word, that [...]