Food-based biofuels can spur climate change

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

These so-called food-based biofuels can actually hurt the environment if they are produced on land that was formerly grassland, rain forest or savanna, the scientists said in the journal Science.

Nonfossil fuels -- ethanol made from corn or sugar cane and biodiesel made from palm trees or soybeans -- are meant to lessen dependence on petroleum products, which release the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when they burn.

As demand for these alternative fuels grows, farmers are plowing under forests and grasslands that used to store carbon and keep it from getting into the atmosphere, and using these lands to grow the food crops that now can be used for ethanol or biodiesel.

CENTURIES OF CARBON DEBT

The next worst case was the planting of soybeans in the Amazon, which would not pay for itself in renewable soy biodiesel for 319 years.

"Our group has looked at using diverse mixtures of native species ... (on) prairie land, land that's restored back into prairies," Hill said in a telephone interview. "We essentially have no native prairies left in this nation but we can restore land into prairies, thereby restoring an ecosystem that was natural and also getting the biofuel benefit from it."

"There is an urgent need for policy that ensures biofuels are not produced on productive forest, grassland or cropland," the said in the letter.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization cited its own study that indicated farmers could produce enough feedstock for biofuels through environmentally sustainable no-till agriculture.

"If we take every corn kernel we produce in this nation and convert it to ethanol, we would offset only 12 percent of our gasoline use," he said. "And that doesn't include the energy it took to produce that ethanol in the first place.