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 [...]

Questioning the Relationship Between Biofuels and Food Costs

A new study released by Texas A&M’s Agricultural and Food Policy Center undermines one of the key assumptions used in the studies that attributed a huge “carbon debt” to biofuels.
The assumption used by Searchinger et al. is that biofuel production increases the cost of all commodity grains, encouraging countries to convert additional land – such [...]

British Government to Study Indirect Impacts of Biofuels

Last week, Britain’s Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) launched a series of studies of the indirect land-use impacts of biofuels, following a lecture by Princeton’s Tim Searchinger, lead author of “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change” published in Science in February.
The RFA intends to publish a draft report [...]

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 [...]

Is the Debate on Land Use Over?

The full implications of the German Marshall Fund and Nature Conservancy articles in Science and the agenda and arguments of environmental and conservation advocates are coming more into focus. Consider comments posted by Nathanael Greene of the Natural Resources Defense Council on his Switchboard:
While we still do not have international protocols that pay to protect [...]

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 [...]

Biofuels and Carbon Debt

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 establishes an ambitious renewable fuel standard that increases biofuel production and use to 36 billion gallons by 2022. The standard also mandates that renewable fuels produced in new facilities constructed after enactment of the Act, which occurred in December 2007, “achieve at least a 20 percent reduction in lifecycle [...]