biofuels

Charcoal carbon sequestration — birth of a new CO2 removal wedge?

I would love to hear Graham Nash and David Crosby rerecord their old "Carry Me" song about agrichar and removing carbon from the atmosphere while revitalizing soils:

"Bury me, buuuu-reee me, bury me, across the world ..."

This is sounding so good it's scary -- like I am being set up to have my bubble burst when it turns out to violate one or more basic physical laws, or only be net negative by ignoring some huge emissions somewhere in the process, or whatever. But for today, I'm going to feel a little better:

Biofuel bashing

Now with a German accent! (h/t: Gristmill reader CJ)

Biofuel rating system may be premature

I received an email yesterday from Richard Plevin over at Berkeley:

I can only conclude from your post on Grist that you didn't actually read our report. The implications that we are either unaware of the environmental issues surrounding biofuels, or that we dismiss them, are incorrect. Your post does a disservice to those reading it by suggesting this.

I encourage you to read our report.

Likewise, I could conclude that he didn't read my post since he missed the gist, which was that all biofuels agrofuels being produced today may be as bad or worse than fossil fuels overall, and therefore the value of a system to rate their greenness or lack thereof is questionable. If they are worse than fossil fuels, what would be the point? The authors of the report are counting angels on the head of a pin.

Biofuel environmental rating

People are slowly beginning to realize that not all biofuels are created equal. A group of UC-Berkeley researchers are proposing a five star fuel rating system:

The debate over whether biofuels like ethanol are better for the environment than fossil fuels has left many consumers confused and unsure where to fill their gas tanks.

Tell me about it. My guess is that these researchers use biodiesel and are hoping to put a few Stars on Thars, right next to the biodiesel sticker they already have. But what are the odds that after studying this topic in great detail they find that all crop-based biofuels being produced today are worse for the environment than fossil fuels? Trust me, true or not, that isn't going to happen.

Poll results!

The NYT has a bucketload of important poll results. Here’s the full poll; here’s the summary: Americans in large bipartisan numbers say the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having serious effects on the environment now or will soon and think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects, the latest […]

Some miscellaneous but connected items

The daily news is never short of articles on biofuels these days, but these three caught my eye today.

Biofuels scam at 12 o’clock high!

Is there anything that the rich and venal won't do to stave off limits on jet flights? The new scam is a discussion of laundering the fossil fuels through "biofuels" ...

Music to the ears of us corn hataz

From the WSJ energy blog: Is the anti-ethanol crusade beginning to gather steam among mainstream Western publications? Two weeks after The Economist confessed, in a stunned-sounding editorial that it found itself in agreement with Fidel Castro’s vehement critique of foods-as-fuels, Foreign Affairs magazine has also jumped on board. In the magazine’s May edition, two professors […]

How to save the last carbon sinks

Marcel Silvius recently declared in the Herald Tribune that palm oil is a failure as a biofuel. Rhett Butler over at Mongabay thinks otherwise, as he argues in an article titled, um, "Palm oil is not a failure as a biofuel." His main point is that even if America and Europe were to reject palm oil biodiesel as inherently unsustainable, the forests would still be converted to palm oil by China. We can't stop its development by refusing to use it, so we (by "we" he means Europe) need to get in there and finance the establishment of sustainable practices now or we will have no say in the matter later. China will own the industry: