Weekly Blog Roundup

This week in the blogosphere, attention students, according to the blog, smartplanet
“Did you know there’s an ongoing federal grant program for U.S. college and university students that are working on so-called “P3″ ideas? P3 stands for “People, Prosperity and the Planet,” which are concerns fundamental to ideas of sustainability.
“The money is given out by [...]

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 [...]

Why ILUC Theory Bears No Resemblance to Reality

Iowa State’s Bruce Babcock has written a defense of the current economic equilibrium models used by the EPA and California Air Resources Board, in light of the fact that the models’ assumptions about soybean production and acreage have turned out wrong. Babcock frames the debate over international land use change as “whether the models used by [...]

Strange Bedfellows Indeed

The Environmental Working Group, Friends of the Earth, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Marine Manufacturers Association, the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have cosigned a series of letters to Senate leaders opposing additional study of the theory of indirect land use change. These groups would like to lock [...]

The Case for Correct Logic

Michael Grunwald of Time Magazine recently published a new, rather self-serving article in the Washington Monthly, filled with distorted logic and mangled facts.
His portrayal of Tim Searchinger as a humble lawyer who experienced an epiphany about biofuels is disingenuous at best. While now a visiting scholar at Princeton University, Tim Searchinger was formerly a lobbyist [...]

The Facts of Life on Waxman-Markey

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have … the Peterson amendment to the Waxman-Markey bill, formally known as H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). According to Grist contributor Meredith Niles, there are a number of positive inclusions in the amendment that were [...]

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.” [...]

EPA Gathers Input on RFS

The EPA today held a public hearing on the RFS2 Rule and will be holding a Workshop on Lifecycle Greenhouse Gas Analysis for the Proposed Revisions to the National Renewable Fuels Standard Program tomorrow. These fora are intended to solicit feedback from stakeholders in the rulemaking and provide information on how the EPA developed its [...]

Opportunity Costs

The Washington Post this week reported on a carbon-credit proposal being put forward by Ecuador for consideration in UNFCCC Climate Change Talks. Ecuador is asking for carbon credits in exchange for leaving undisturbed one-fifth of its petroleum reserves, which are located beneath a protected national park that is part of the Amazon rainforest.
The proposal is [...]

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 [...]