Paul:

I must disagree with your essay below. Certain key points you espouse are factually incorrect, and certain other points are oversimplifications of a complex issue. (I learned long ago that we are unlikely to solve complex problems by oversimplifying them.) If the factual basis for the argument is wrong, the conclusions may be wrong as well.

The argument that there is no more cropland is incorrect. At least in the US, there is a significant farmland acreage that is idled each year as part of government crop support subsidies. The "Conservation Reserve" program pays farmers to not grow crops, in order to prevent an excesive supply of major commodities that would depress farm prices. While that does not mean that we can completely replace current liquid transportation fuels, we could easily double the current supply, a significant accomplishment. Currently the bulk of this land is in grasslands, so it is not growing trees anyway. A good energy policy would end subsidies of fossil fuels AND subsidies to idle farmland, and provide incentives to grow our own liquid fuels. This is both economically feasible and practicla and would have a net benefit to atmospheric CO2 levels.

The argument that ethanol uses more energy than it produces is correct, at least in some circumstances, but it is incorrect to therfore assume that this is true of all biomass fuels. I have seen no analysis that shows biodiesel production has this same issue. While ethanol derived from corn grown for grain has negligible net energy production and may even be an energy consuming process, cellulosic ethanol and ethanol from agricultural waste products is clearly a net energy gain. It is certainly true that growing corn, harvesting the grain, and transporting it to a large centralized distillery is wasteful of a lot of the energy. A comprehensive system in which grain is used as livestock feed, ethanol is produced from waste biomass, and methane is produced from the livestock manures, would be a highly efficient energy system. Current govenrment incentives for ethanol were designed by Archer-Daniels-Midland, rather than for the benefit of American consumers or small farmer! s. But that does not mean ther eis an inherent flaw in biomass fuels, it means we should fix the government subsidy policies. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

The claim that solar energy is the most cost-effective form of renewable energy is contradicted by the real world experience. Electricity from wind is currently selling at 6-8 cents per kilowatt-hour, solar costs 11-20 cents. The reason we see numerous proposals for wind farms and not for solar farms is precisely because of this price difference. Coal-generation is around 5 cents, but with sequestration would likely go to 7-10 cents. If electrcity from coal becomes more expensive than from renewable sources (i.e., if the true environmental costs are internalized), the market for coal-fired electricty dries up and we will see a huge boom in wind farm construction.

It is incorrect to claim that current atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are too high for human surival, as we are clearly surviving quite well. The concern arises from the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere (~300 years), and from trendlines showing continued increases in emission rates, and from the long lifetimes of the CO2 generating facilities in our modern society. It is highly unlikely that a power plant, once built, would be shut down before the end of its useful life. New power plants will likely continue to emit carbon dioxide for the next 50 years. Existing power plants such as Fort Martin have expected lifetimes remaining of at least 20-30 years. If they did not, Allegheny would not be building scrubbers with half-billion dollar price tags. But the danger from these trends is from the projected increases in CO2 levels in future years, not from what is currently present. Even with the projected doubling of CO2 by the end of this century, humans will "survive" quite well, at least those in rich countries. Agriculture is quite adaptable and will easily sustain food production at higher CO2 levels. The main concern is that the environmental impacts will be felt disproportionately on natural ecosystems and on low-income people and countries who can least afford the recovery from a Hurricane Katrina-style event.

This leads to the debate over your policy recommendation that we abandon the use carbon burning within five years. That would mean that all of our current investment in transportation, power plants, factories, and other infrastructure would get thrown out before the end of their useful life. The energy needed to smelt the ore, produce the steel, make the concrete, build the buildings and roads, etc., would be wasted as all this goes to the junk heap. While it is foolish to buy a gas-guzzling SUV, it would be even more wasteful to simply abandon all the SUVs currently on the road because the energy needs to make them is such a lage part of their total energy cost, and the energy required to replace them prematurely, e.g., wityh solar electric vehicles, would significantly outweight any energy savings from the SUV's fuel use. I believe that a proposal to abandon all carbon burning within five years, in addition to being politically impossible, is a net energy loser. Our s! ociety cannot build that many wind mills and solar panels that quickly.

The consensus of scientific opinion is that any changes will be gradual, and that adaptations to society, if started now, can lead to a gradual transition to avoid the worst impacts. The most severe impacts will be felt by people not in our lifetime but two to four generations into the future, and by then, the impacts may truly be irreversible. It is true that, in recent months, there has been a lot of press coverage and scientific debate over the "tipping point" concept, and it may well be that changes will occur more rapidly than currently believed. But even James Hansen expects that we would have 10 years before this is irreversible. There does not appear to be any reason to require abandoning all fossil fuels within five years, and biomass-based fuels, being renewable, should be sustainable indefinitely into the future. Because biomass-based fuels are easily compatible with existing engines, furnaces, etc., they provide a transitional fuel to take advantage of the e! xisitng investment in societal infrastructure, as they displace the use of fossil fuels. Admittedly, they are not the whole answer, but there is no silver bullet, and they are an important component of any transition strategy toward renewable energy.

In conclusion, I think that the arguments are based on demonstrably false assertions, and that they are neither necessary nor desirable. No one is more concerned about global warming than I, but to rely on such assertions reduces our credibility and makes it harder to convince decision-makers to make needed changes because the global warming doubters in the fossil fuel industry will debunk these assertions as easily as I have. We do not have the economic or political clout to buy legislators the way industry can. Our only political currency is our credibility. If we lose credibility, we lose. Period.

JBK

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"Paul Brown" pbbrown@hsc.wvu.edu 09/27/06 9:12 PM >>>

Here are the reasons to oppose biomass fuels, from a column I'm working on:

BIOFUEL BOONDOGGLE One proposed alternative to fossil fuels is biofuels: substances made from plants grown specifically to make fuels such as ethanol and methane. These fuels can be burned in internal combustion engines and used to make electrical power. The beauty of this proposal is that the CO2 produced by biofuel combustion is balanced by the CO2 consumed by the plants to make the precursors for the fuels. Take the case of ethanol: the plant (corn, for example) makes sugars and all the other materials in the plant, like cellulose, from CO2 and substances in the soil. We then ferment the sugar to make alcohol (and yeast, which has its uses too). The alcohol is distilled and its combustion produces less CO2 than was removed from the atmosphere by the plants (because there are organic waste products). Along similar lines, soybeans can be used to produce oil that can be converted to biodiesel. In such a system, we would create a cycle in which we are using today’s sunshine, which powers the photosynthesis that makes the sugars, for power. Today’s sunshine is renewable. There will be more for all our tomorrows for billions of years. When we use fossil fuels, we use ancient sunshine, millions of years old, which powered the photosynthesis that was used to make plants and microorganisms that eventually were transformed to petroleum, coal, and natural gas. Fossil fuels are not renewable, because they’re not being replaced at the rate they’re being consumed. Unfortunately, biofuels can’t replace all our fossil fuels because we would have to devote more farmland than is available to produce them in sufficient quantities. Their advocates counter that at least we could cut down on our use of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that the amount of energy needed to fertilize the farmland, tend the plants, harvest the crop, convert the biomass to useable fuel, and distribute the fuel, exceeds or nearly exceeds the energy in the end product. A lot of farmland would be dedicated to producing a very low yield of energy. There are other problems with biofuels that outrank the low yield problem. First, there isn’t really any available farmland. Because of the population explosion, humans now use just about every bit of arable land available, and in several recent years, we haven’t grown enough food to feed everyone. We’ve had to dip into global food reserves, and they are now dangerously depleted. We can (and do) “create” more farmland with more irrigation, by destroying more rainforests, and by crowding people into cities. But these practices already lower water tables to dangerously low levels, create deserts, decrease CO2 absorption by forests in a time when we need to increase it, and increase crowding, with the attendant rise in unemployment, pollution, evolution of new disease strains, and social instability. The argument that biofuel crops provide a cycle in which CO2 is absorbed at least as much as it is produced ignores a crucial side effect. Even if we had the land needed to grow such crops, an area of farmland devoted to them absorbs far less CO2 than the same area of rapidly growing forest, because trees have far more photosynthetic capacity than any farm plants. Our use of other caebon sources will continue to accumulate CO2 in the atmosphere. Current atmospheric levels of CO2 are already too high for human survival. Positive feedback effects of melting ice (due to decreased albedo) and melting permafrost (which is releasing methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as potent as CO2) are accelerating global warming. Left unchecked, this will result soon in runaway warming which we will not survive. The only prudent course of action is to stop burning carbon and start removing CO2 from the atmosphere as fast as we can if we hope to survive. There is no way around these facts, no "trick" we can use to keep burning carbon. We know how to stop burning carbon: go to reneable energy in the form of solar, wind, tidal, wave, and geothermal, in roughly that order of environmental friendliness, availability, and economic viability. We have the technology and the cost is lower than fossil fuel and nuclear if we consider true costs such as environmental and human health consequences. A shift of subsidies (our tax dollars) away from fossils, and withdrawal from our global military attempts to monopolize access to oil (Johnson, Chalmers, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004) would pay for it and provide jobs and renewed prosperity at home. There’s no earthly reason to burn carbon for more than another five years, except maybe mindless consumerism. Do we know how to accelerate the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere? Yes, although not enough yet. That will be the topic of my next column.

I hope you'll find this reasoning compelling.

Paul

Paul Brown Physiology Department West Virginia University Health Sciences Center Morgantown, WV 26506 (304) 293 - 1512