The need for good research

The rush to put biofuels in our gas tanks has given people analyzing natural resources and conflict some work to do. How are European and American policy mandates to dramatically increase the use of biofuels affecting the places that grow biofuel inputs? It seems fair to say that little consideration has been given to the potential conflict and equity impacts of this surge in demand for palm oil, sugarcane, and corn.

After President Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, which called for massive increases in biofuels, we heard stories of skyrocketing corn tortilla prices and resulting social disruptions.

Now we have stories coming from places like West Kalimantan, a remote region of Indonesia where the rush to plant palm-oil plantations is generating conflict with Indonesians who grow rubber trees and other crops on their small plots of land. The NGO Friends of the Earth Netherlands has a new report calling out the unethical practices of some palm-oil companies that clear existing crops first and make payouts (maybe) to the farmers who own the land later.

It strikes me that this particular link between natural resource management and conflict offers an avenue for addressing one of the traditional shortcomings of environment and conflict research.

Individuals support policies they don’t live by voluntarily

Over at the New Yorker, James Surowiecki draws our attention to this oddity: The curious fact is that many people...

China’s emissions aren’t really China’s

If you want a Chinese perspective on global warming, a good place to start is this China Daily opinion piece, "Climate change is reshaping global politics." Pang Zhongying, a research fellow with the Joint Program on Globalization under the CRF-Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, makes some points worth remembering, especially:

Western countries and industrialized Asian nations like Japan and the Republic of Korea have moved many of their factories to developing countries such as China and India, where cheap labor allows them to manufacture at lower costs than at home. This globalization of production has resulted in the discharge of much more waste in poor nations that otherwise would have been released in developed countries. As a matter of fact, not all of the greenhouse gases released "in China" or "from China" are really "China's".

Think of our large and growing trade deficit with China as the U.S. exporting industrial greenhouse-gas emissions. Worse still, China has a more coal-intensive industrial base, so producing things there generates far more pollution than if we had produced the same goods here.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Injecting CO2 into oil wells is not real carbon sequestration

Capturing CO2 and injecting it into a well to squeeze more oil out of the ground is not real carbon sequestration. Why? When the recovered oil is burned, it releases at least as much CO2 as was stored (and possibly much more). Therefore, CO2 used for such enhanced oil recovery (EOR) does not reduce net carbon emissions and should not be sold to the public as a carbon offset.

Yet a company, Blue Source, LLC, proposes to do just that: to capture the CO2 from a fertilizer plant, pipe it to an oil field, and inject it into wells for EOR :

The company hopes to profit from the project by earning credits for the carbon reductions in voluntary carbon markets and by selling carbon dioxide to energy companies.

The deal will cut CO2 from the plant by about 650,000 tonnes per year by permanently storing the emissions in the oil fields, he said. The U.S. Department of Energy says that capturing CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery could greatly boost U.S. oil reserves while permanently keeping CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

Uh, no. To repeat, if the captured CO2 is used to extract oil that releases CO2 when it is burned, then how is that offsetting anything?

It’s not a ‘sustainable’ biofuel

So Europeans are buying Indonesian palm oil as a "sustainable" biofuel, but it isn't sustainable, as we've noted before. The tragedy continues:

Palm oil companies are burning peat forests to clear land for plantations in Indonesia's Riau province, despite government pledges to end forest fires ... Blazes have started flaring again since the end of June with the start of the dry season.

How a big deal is this? As The New York Times put it earlier this year, "Considering these emissions, Indonesia had quickly become the world's third-leading producer of carbon emissions that scientists believe are responsible for global warming." [Note to NYT: you can drop the "scientists believe" crap. Carbon emissions cause global warming -- deal with it, MSM!]

The emissions from the 1997 fires alone are staggering, as Nature reported in 2002 (sub. req'd):

A chat with actor Morgan Freeman

It’s 6 p.m. and I’m sitting by the phone in a midtown Manhattan cubicle, waiting for Morgan Freeman to finish...