The Biodiesel and Ethanol Lies - The Emperor Has No Clothes
You may remember my “When Green Energy Isn’t” article from June, when i pointed out a few flaws in the whole biofuels scenario. When you burn ethanol, you produce CO2, when you make fertilizer to grow the corn, use tractors to plow the fields, ferment corn to make the ethanol, you are generating CO2. The only real question here, is how much CO2 that you are generating compared to gasoline and traditional diesel?
Well whatever that answer is, a new study out of Princeton, published in Science, demonstrates that when clearing of land used for biofuels is counted in the equation, they generate twice the CO2 as would gasoline. Joseph Fargione, lead author of another paper, also published in Science says ”The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land”. The short story is that growing crops for biofuels replaces vegetation that actually removed carbon from the air. This means all the carbon stored before biofuel farming is now in the air as CO2 and the carbon that is being taken from the air by the crops is being used to burn as biofuel putting that CO2 right back into the atmosphere.
I’ve said it before, i’ll say it again: We can’t just shift to a fuel that has a smaller carbon component, we need a solution that has little or no carbon dioxide emissions. Moving CO2 around so that an industrial process, such as making biofuels, wastes more energy and emits more CO2, while it’s end products, biodiesel and ethanol bost a lower CO2 ouput than crude oil derived fuels. It’s not just bad policy and a threat to world food supplies, Bio Fuels are the Big Lie of this new century. Sure they keep the US from needing Middle East Oil, but that’s a fight for commerce or against terrorism, not a fight against CO2. Don’t fall for the “Biofuels” wolf, wearing sheep’s clothing.