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 [...]

Life Cycle Analysis, International Land Use Change and Uncertainty

Bruce Dale, University Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University, shared this presentation that he gave during a webinar hosted by the North Central Bioeconomy Consortium. In it, he highlights the number of factors in Life Cycle Analysis and Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) models that produce uncertainty – in other words, if [...]

How to Measure Land Use Change

Both the U.S. EPA and California’s Air Resources Board are currently considering how and whether to incorporate the indirect effects of U.S. biofuels production on carbon emissions from land use change in other parts of the world. The Renewable Fuel Standard passed by Congress in December 2007 requires inclusion of “significant emissions from land use [...]

It’s Carbon Payback Time

A recent study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin takes another look at the “carbon debt” models proposed by Searchinger and Fargione in ScienceXpress earlier this year. Searchinger and Fargione argued that biofuel development in the United States and Europe would lead to the destruction of rainforests and grassland in Brazil and other tropical [...]

UK Study Highlights Uncertainty in Calculating Indirect Land Use Emissions

Britain’s Renewable Fuels Agency this week released the Gallagher Review, a report on the indirect effects of biofuels production that was prompted by the Searchinger and Fargione studies published in Science earlier this year. (See this blog’s earlier post on the forthcoming study.)
The summary of the conclusions of the Gallagher Review include some very telling [...]

Trying to Define the Indirect Land Use Issue

Michigan State University Professor of Chemical Engineering Bruce Dale recently sent a letter to colleagues interpreting the analyses by Searchinger et al. and Fargione et al. in Science. In the letter, Dale says, “The Searchinger and Fargione argument at its root is this: corn (and perhaps cellulosic) ethanol is not sustainable because it will divert [...]

Scientists Respond to Carbon Debt Issue

Reaction to the ScienceXpress articles by Searchinger et al. and Tilman et al. has focused on the assumptions the teams of authors used in measuring greenhouse gas emissions from changes in land use. As Michigan State University Professor of Chemical Engineering Bruce Dale points out,
Both of these papers are modeling studies and are therefore completely [...]