Environmental Valuation & Cost-Benefit News
The Clean Energy Scam
03/29/08
10:14:38 am, by damageva 
, 347 words, 170 views 
Categories: Energy, Climate Change GHG Carbon CO2, U.S., Europe, Latin America, Agriculture, Forestry and Food, Newspaper/Mag/TV/Media Story, Costs and Benefits
The Clean Energy Scam
...
The Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon.... Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation....
This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.
...The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010....
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
...
By Michael Grunwald
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
Time www.Times.com
March 27, 2008
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Environmental Valuation & Cost-Benefit News
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