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The WSJ tries to use biofuels fear factor to urge climate inaction

2009-10-31T17:40:00Z

Recently, I posted a video and a narrative explanation about a critical accounting error that threatens to turn climate legislation into a big incentive for deforestation. Put as simply as possible, the House climate bill and the Boxer-Kerry Senate bill both assume that burning most biomass is exactly carbon neutral, meaning that it doesn’t result in an increase or decrease in atmospheric levels of global warming pollution. Burning biomass to replace coal or natural gas or oil can be good for the climate or bad for it depending on the source of biomass, but it will almost never be exactly neutral, and the climate bill can’t encourage better bioenergy if we refuse to count the emissions. In fact, a climate bill that assumes all biomass has no emissions won’t be able to achieve its goals.

In a recent editorial the Wall Street Journal got right the basic idea that this loophole is a big deal but then jumped to the wrong conclusion, suggesting that rather than fix this biomass loophole we should just be afraid of the future. As a friend of mine put it, it’s like we’re tied to the tracks with the coal powered steam engine of climate change barreling towards us. The loophole will make it harder for us to get off the tracks, most people are focused on how to make getting off the tracks as profitable as possible, but the WSJ would just have us throw up our hands in despair. But, hey, 50% right is pretty good for the WSJ editorial board.

Sadly, the idea that we shouldn’t fully and scientifically account for the pros and cons of biofuels has become a theme for the industry as of late. As part of another one of the infamous last minute deals in the House climate bill, the corn ethanol industry lobbied successfully for a provision that would prohibit EPA from fully accounting for land-use change emissions from biofuels when implementing the RFS. As mentioned earlier, the industry has also been attacking the definition of renewable biomass, expanding that to the point where it doesn’t provide any meaningful protections. And in parallel with all of this, the industry has been lobbying to force EPA to approve the use of blends of ethanol and gasoline with more than 10% ethanol even though the health and safety testing of such blends hasn’t been completed.

The driving force behind all of this? The corn ethanol industry’s plan to increase their market from 15 billion gallons to around 25 billion. The corn growers are already planning to production and just trying to knock down the barriers one at a time. This from Philip Brasher’s blog:

It’s too early, the growers said, to know when they’ll ask Congress to raise the 15-billion-gallon mandate.

“Basically we’re trying to take care of those hurdles one at a time,” [Darrin] Ihnen [president of the National Corn Growers Association] said.

The specter of gutted biofuels policies opening the door to lots more corn ethanol is worthy of the WSJ fears, but we are not helpless victims here. I wrote on Thursday about a proposal to reform the biofuels tax credits to pay for performance rather than the current norm, which just pays for volume. But to make this change, we have to start actually measuring the real performance of biofuels. That’s the bottom line here: we can’t get biofuels right if we don’t start counting it right.

Biofuels and climate: first step to getting them right is counting them

2009-10-31T17:39:42Z

Last Monday, I posted a video about a critical accounting error that threatens to turn climate legislation into a big incentive for deforestation. Here’s a narrative version of the same description. If you’ve seen the video this should sound and look familiar.

Let’s start just thinking about a basic bioenergy plant—it could be turning corn into ethanol, but let’s imagine one turning trees into electricity. The carbon in those trees ends up in the atmosphere as CO2.

The problem is that the climate bill passed by the House and the one being debated by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee assumes that as long as those trees are “renewable biomass” then we can just ignore those emissions. Renewable biomass is a term used in the RFS to preclude the most destructive sources of biomass from being used to make biofuels. It’s about avoiding habitat and ecosystem destruction and really has little to do with carbon accounting. Furthermore, the final deals in the House basically expanded the renewable biomass definition to include everything. So essentially the House climate bill ignores all emissions from biomass.

But if we compare the carbon flows from our hypothetical biopower plant, we can see that they are essentially the same as those from a coal plant (or an oil refinery if we were imagining an ethanol plant. In both cases, carbon that wasn’t in the atmosphere yesterday is ending up there today to make our energy.

To justify this incorrect accounting, many look to the past absorption of carbon by the trees to justify the carbon neutral claims. But if we add the past absorption into the picture, we can see that that doesn’t really change anything. Still carbon that wasn’t in the atmosphere yesterday (because it was in the trees) is ending up there today to make our energy.

For bioenergy to be better than fossil fuels, we have to a) be honest and account for this initial release of carbon and b) look to the future. If we simply regrow our forest (or crop) maintaining the carbon balance on the land, we can start to amortize this initial release over more and more bioenergy. But we have to keep a number of things in mind. For instance, even mature forests still absorb carbon, so we need to account for the fact that the forest or field would have been absorbing carbon anyway. Also, forests take a long time to grow back. So between foregone sequestration and slow growth, carbon neutrality would take decades and maybe centuries to achieve—much longer than scientists tell us we have if we’re going to preserve life as we know it.

Furthermore, if the forest or field used to provide the biomass burned was being used before for other purposes, we have to recognize that the prior demand for food or fiber doesn’t simply disappear. Especially in the face of population growth and rising incomes around the world, we need to understand where that demand goes and what are the emissions impacts of displacing that demand. This is the infamous indirect land-use change issue.

There’s lots of nuts and bolts in understanding these absorption and releases on the land over time, but two things should be obvious to us all: 1) biopower might be good or bad for climate, but the assumption of neutrality is almost always going to be wrong; and 2) greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming whether they come from fossil fuels or biofuels, but we can’t reduce emissions that we won’t admit are happening.

To understand why this so important, think of a balloon. If the balloon represents all of our greenhouse gas emissions, we want our climate policies to push down on the balloon and reduce our pollution. But if our policies only push down on part of the balloon, industry has a strong incentive to simply shift the emissions from the regulated fossil fuel emissions to the unregulated bioenergy emissions. That part of the balloon swells up, our climate keeps warming, and we lose all our forests and grasslands while we’re at it.

Another less publicized article in Science recently looked at this balloon effect and came to the conclusion that exempting emissions from bioenergy will have major impacts on forests around the world. Interestingly, this analysis finds bioenergy playing a big role under both scenario (A) that ignores biomass emissions and scenario (B) that includes these emissions. The difference is the type of land used to grow biomass—pastures verse forests.

The ideal approach would be to simply account for the emissions from burning biomass at the smokestack or tailpipe just like any other emissions, and credit or debit sequestration or emissions at the landscape level. Unfortunately, the science of accounting of emissions and sequestration on the land is not as solid as accounting for emissions at smokestacks and tailpipes. As a result putting land under the cap at this point would weaken the certainty of the cap. (This is why it’s so important that EPA play a lead role in overseeing agricultural carbon offsets, but that’s a different blog.)

Instead, we recommend directing EPA working with USDA and DOE to figure out a way to assign different emissions factors to different sources of biomass based on how the land is being managed and the expected net GHG balance.

Unfortunately, some in the biofuels industry have responded to the idea that a climate bill intended to reduce our carbon emissions should at least try to count those emissions accurately with all too predictable pleas that they be exempted (subscription required). Earlier in October, a group of biofuel industry organizations issued a statement complaining about potential “double regulation.” Beyond the climate bill, the other regulation in question? The Renewable Fuel Standard, a huge government mandate for 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol, 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels, and 5 billion gallons of other advanced biofuels. As long as these biofuels are being produced, oil companies have to buy them regardless of cost. Now I have no love-loss for the oil companies, but this amounts to a huge subsidy to the biofuels industry, and in return for this government largess the qualifying fuels are supposed to provide real GHG benefits. This doesn’t seem too much to ask, but if the RFS is such a burden on the biofuels industry that it can’t comply with a climate law, there can only be one conclusion: let’s end the RFS.

However, we need low-carbon fuels and electricity, and if we do it right biofuels and biopower can play an important part in helping to stop global warming. But we can’t get biofuels right if we don’t start counting them right.

A Greener Biofuels Tax Credit

2009-10-29T23:30:46Z

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how Loni Kemp won a Farm Foundation contest for an essay laying out a greener biofuel tax credit. Today in DC, this reward was given with appropriate fanfare. Jeremy Martin at UCS also deserves lots of credit for helping to shape this idea. Here now for your reading pleasure is a short summary of how I would like to see the biofuel tax credits reformed based on all of Loni and Jeremy’s great work.

Summary of a Greener Biofuel Tax Credit Proposal

Policies designed to encourage development of the first generation of biofuels—ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans—were supported with the goals of advancing national energy security, jobs and rural economic development, improved air quality, and superior life-cycle greenhouse gas performance compared to gasoline. Yet actual delivery of those benefits has been vigorously debated and unintended environmental effects of intensive corn and soybean production on polluted waters and degraded soils are well documented.

A growing consensus acknowledges that the next generation of biofuels—from cellulose and eventually from algae—has potential to deliver higher levels of benefits. We expect better life-cycle greenhouse gas performance, improved fossil energy balance, expanded land areas to grow feedstocks within the US, more sustainable farming practices leading to cleaner water and healthier soils, and less effect on food prices. These benefits are by no means guaranteed, however. Policies are needed to ensure that promised benefits materialize and to prevent unintended adverse environmental effects.

Support for corn ethanol tax credits has dwindled because of concerns that promised climate benefits are not guaranteed, because of the recent irrational exuberance in expansion, and because current tax credits duplicate the Renewable Fuel Standard which mandates a minimum market for biofuels. At the same time there is considerable support for tax incentives for cellulosic biofuels based on expectations of superior performance. Thus, guiding the biofuels industry along a green path will also ensure its economic and political survival.

What is missing from current tax policy is a requirement for actual performance in delivering expected environment and climate benefits. To remedy this, we propose to reform the mix of existing federal biofuel tax credits—including the ethanol blender’s credit—into one performance-based tax credit. The actual level of the payment per gallon will vary, according to the sustainability performance scores of the biofuels each biorefinery produces.

This reformed biofuel tax credit will:

Be technology neutral—apply to all fuels (ethanol, biodiesel, butanol, etc.) and all feedstocks (corn, cellulose, algae, vegetable oils, etc).
Be performance based—reward better environmental performance with higher tax credit payments.
Protect the climate—reward lifecycle carbon emission reductions beyond those required by the Renewable Fuel Standard.
Protect the environment—reward soil, water, and wildlife conservation on the farm where feedstocks are produced.
Be streamlined—use workable reporting systems for farmers, biofuel refiners, and the Internal Revenue Service.
Be budget neutral—use savings from phasing out current production tax credits to fund the new greener biofuels tax credit.

The new tax credit will have a value of up to $1 per 76,000 Btu (the energy content of one gallon of ethanol), half of the credit will reward lower carbon fuels, and half will reward other ecosystem services. To make it easier for the value of the credit to get back to the farmers and biorefiners that have to change practices to get higher tax credit payment, the credit will shift the from the blenders—the oil companies and refineries which blend ethanol into gasoline—to the biorefineries which produce biofuels.

Corn ethanol and soy biodiesel producers will be eligible if they employ advanced processes such as renewable power and purchase feedstocks from farmers who are building soil quality and minimizing polluted runoff. Next generation biofuels could earn even more if they vastly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and rely on perennial feedstocks which require little land disturbance, fertilizer or irrigation.

Climate performance

The half of the new tax credit which rewards carbon performance will be paid in direct proportion to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, based on the EPA’s calculation of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions currently being developed for the Renewable Fuel Standard. The refinery’s choice of feedstocks, technology, and management of the direct emissions of the refinery itself will determine their lifecycle emissions. A zero carbon biofuel (100% reduction) will be eligible for the full carbon tax credit of $.50 per gallon. Tax credits will ramp down to $0.00 per gallon for biofuels achieving no reduction of greenhouse gas emissions compared to gasoline. If a facility is grandfathered from the RFS GHG standards and therefore does not have a EPA certified emissions level, then it would be assumed to provide no emissions reductions.

Environmental performance

National biofuels policies currently ignore environmental performance, beyond the minimum greenhouse gas metric in the Renewable Fuel Standard. What is missing is recognition of feedstock farming systems that are kinder to soil, water and wildlife. To earn the second half of the greener tax credit—up to $.50—refineries will want to optimize conservation on the land, and will purchase more sustainable feedstocks. It is critical that the industry not be motivated solely by low price feedstocks, which forces growers to cut corners and ignore conservation opportunities. A performance-based tax policy telegraphs incentives to minimize tillage, fertilizer use, erosion and runoff all the way through the system down to the farmer.

The key environmental elements on which farmers have an effect—soil quality, water quality and wildlife habitat—will be scored for feedstocks.. A simple evaluation tool has been developed by USDA where data is easily entered by farmers or their technical advisors, and scores are determined. The Conservation Measurement Tool will be streamlined to apply specifically to biofuels feedstocks. USDA will develop certification criteria for independent, third-party professionals to assess and annually spot check feedstock environmental scores. Similar evaluations will be developed for forests, wastes and algae feedstocks. Scores must be above a minimum stewardship threshold, and will be averaged for each biorefinery.

The IRS will simply plug in the annual greenhouse gas score and the annual average feedstock environmental scores overseen by EPA and USDA and determine a total tax credit rate per eligible gallon of annual production, up to the maximum of $1.00 per gallon equivalent.

Convertible Tax Credits

Because many innovative biofuel technologies are being advanced by startup companies with limited revenues, allowing conversion of production tax credits to investment tax credits or a direct grant for the first billion gallons of advanced and cellulosic biofuels will facilitate the rapid scale-up of this industry. This approach will also help with the difficult investment climate currently facing this fledgling industry.

Eligible Biofuel Production:

Feedstocks are contained in the definition of renewable biomass
Feedstock comes from farms meeting USDA Conservation Compliance requirements (erosion, wetlands and grassland conversion)
Feedstock comes from lands not converted from perennial species to annual crops
Feedstock is not from intact ecosystems like forest, wetland and grassland
Feedstock is not irrigated
No invasive or noxious species
Crop residue is removed at sustainable levels
Biorefineries meet the greenhouse gas reduction threshold for the category of renewable fuel
Feedstocks meet the environmental performance threshold score

Conclusion

U.S. biofuels policy must provide clear and strong incentives for bringing advanced biofuel production on line very quickly. It must provide enough support to the first generation of biofuels to stabilize the industry, but without supporting environmental harm. Policy should reward farmers who grow energy crops, and encourage them to switch from corn and soybeans to perennial biomass. All of this must be done while also strongly steering the entire agriculture sector toward excellence in soil and water protection. A performance-based universal Greener Biofuels Tax Credit is the policy we need.

Video: Science on must-fix biomass carbon accounting error

2009-10-26T19:42:19Z

Last Thursday, Science published a very important article by a group of prominent scientists and ecologist about a common error in accounting for carbon from biomass and bioenergy. This might seem really boring at first but it's critically important to stopping global warming and protecting our wild forests and grasslands.

My colleague, Dan Lashof, did a great blog on this report last week. In an effort to explain the accounting error in a potentially more gripping format and suggest some solutions, I prepared the the following video. Homemade, you bet! Watch out for bad lighting and bad drawing. But I hope that it helps.

In the video, I mentioned how many make the common error of pointing to past carbon absorption by plants as an excuse to assume that all biomass emissions are carbon neutral. Here's a timely example in a statement released last week by Bio.

I also talk about how getting this wrong threatens all the world's wild forests and grasslands. Another study in Science from earlier this year (here's a bit more info with a key graphic), actually modeled the balloon effect I demonstrate so vividly.

Wondering what I'm talking about? Check out my video below:

Time to reform biofuel tax credits; Say hello to the GBTC

2009-10-07T17:41:23Z

Yesterday, the Farm Foundation announced the winning essays for it's 30-Year Challenge Policy Competition. One of two winners in the "Climate Change" category is Loni Kemp of Kemp Consulting, whose winning essay is titled: Greener Biofuels Tax Credits: A Policy to Drive Multiple Goals. As Loni kindly acknowledges in her essay, she developed the ideas in the essay while working with yours truly. Jeremy Martin over at UCS also deserves lots of credit.

As I wrote about earlier this week, the GAO released a report last Friday that points out the multiple environmental risks posed by biofuels in general and corn ethanol in particular and how the existing ethanol tax credit is probably unnecessary. What I have proposed in the past and what Loni has gone a long way to making concrete is reforming the myriad biofuel tax credits into a single, technology-neutral, performance based tax credit.

Read Loni's essay for details but the basic idea is very simple:

Replace existing biofuel tax credits that simply pay more money for more volume, with a new tax credit that would pay up to $1.00 per 76000 Btu (the number of Btu in a gallon of ethanol) of fuel for any fuel that receives top ranks in two performance categories--GHG reductions and ecosystem services.
For GHG reduction, a 100% reduction compared to the petroleum alternative would win a fuel $0.50/76000 Btu; obviously a lot can be said about how this would be measured, but ideally this would be based on the same methodology that EPA is developing to implement the RFS2.
For ecosystem services, a perfect score would win a fuel another $0.50/76000Btu, it is challenging to find a single existing tool, but through research that Loni did, we propose using the Soil and Water Evaluation Tool as the core metric. This was developed by USDA for the 2008 Conservation Security Program. It would need to be augmented with monitoring and verification and features to account for forest management and wildlife--currently it is a purely voluntary, self reporting tool that only looks at soil and water impacts on crop land. Algae's performance would also need to be worked in.

Again read Loni's essay for more details, but that's the basics--technology neutral, pay for GHG and ecosystem service performance. It's time we stop throwing tax payer money at mature technologies that in many if not most cases are doing more harm then good. If we're going to give out subsidies in addition to the huge federally mandated market created through the RFS2, it's time that tax payers got something more for their money. It's time to reform the biofuels tax credits to a greener biofuels tax credit.

If clarity of Loni's essay, the simplicity of the idea of paying for performance, or the wastefulness of mandating and bribing at the same time aren't enough to convince you of the urgency of reforming our biofuel tax credits, then I leave you with one more powerful image that I hope will. Below is an image from the Environmental Law Institute at the Wilson Center that shows the balance of energy subsidies between fossil fuels, corn ethanol, all other renewables, and carbon capture and storage from 2002-2008. Corn ethanol alone got 40% more than all other traditional renewables. We can and must get more for out money!

GAO: corn ethanol is risky and tax credit unnecessary

2009-10-05T13:33:31Z

On Friday, the Government Accountability Office released a major report largely about the risks of expanded corn ethanol: Biofuels: Potential Effects and Challenges of Required Increases in Production and Use. Unfortunately, as the report points out, beyond lifecycle GHG emissions, EPA is not required to evaluate any environmental impacts as it implements the 36 billion gallon RFS2 mandate. Perhaps most disturbingly, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress points out that as we blindly rush ahead with this huge federal mandate, we're also giving corn ethanol and the oil companies a huge tax credit to bring us the ethanol they are supposedly mandated to bring us. That's right; last year we, the tax payers, gave up $4 billion to oil companies and the corn ethanol industry so that they would force feed us ethanol that they were legally required to to force feed us. It's a mandate and a bribe, and by 2015 the tax credits will cost us about $6.7 billion a year.

And here's the best part: the report says that bribe--I mean tax credit--isn't even doing any thing. Per the report: the tax credit "may no longer be needed to stimulate conventional corn ethanol production because the domestic industry has matured." And the industry has a mandate for its product.

Here's a little bit of what the GAO report has to say about biofuels:

For agriculture, many experts said that biofuels production has contributed to crop price increases as well as increases in prices of livestock and poultry feed and, to a lesser extent, food. They believe that this trend may continue as the RFS expands. For the environment, many experts believe that increased biofuels production could impair water quality--by increasing fertilizer runoff and soil erosion--and also reduce water availability, degrade air and soil quality, and adversely affect wildlife habitat; however, the extent of these effects is uncertain and could be mitigated by such factors as improved crop yields, feedstock selection, use of conservation techniques, and improvements in biorefinery processing.

Of course the folks over at Growth Energy--the new super aggressive lobbying arm of the corn ethanol industry--are desperately afraid that Congress will start to wonder why they are mandating the oil companies buy corn ethanol and bribing them to buy it too. Here's one of my favorite quotes from an article on the GAO report over the weekend:

The tax credit “isn’t up for renewal until next year, and we believe that discussion is best left for then,” Chris Thorne, director of public affairs for pro-ethanol group Growth Energy...

So here's a simple proposal: let's end the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit and the biodiesel tax credit and the alternative alcohol fuel tax credit and the ethanol import tariff (which is now more than ever just a subsidy for corn ethanol) and even the cellulosic biofuel tax credit. All of these tax credits just give tax dollars away for volumes of fuel that are already required by law under the RFS2. Instead let's create a new technology-neutral tax credit that pays for better environmental performance. As I mentioned earlier, under the RFS2, EPA can only look at GHG impacts of biofuels, but as the GAO report makes clear, biofuels can be damaging across the board. However, the GAO report also makes clear that there are things we can do to reduce these impacts, and I think maybe even make biofuels a beneficial part of our land-use.

I mentioned this basic idea when I testified before the Senate on the RFS2 a year ago, and I'm going to write more about it here soon. Taking money away from the oil and corn ethanol industries is probably near impossible, but maybe the tax credits are so wasteful at this point that reforming them is an impossibly obvious idea.*

*My second favorite quote regarding the report come from an industry analysts hack in this article who suggests that taking the tax credit away will hurt "consumers" forgetting that the $4-6 billion has to come from somewhere. That would be us tax payers, who are also shockingly enough consumers!

Independent peer review confirms EPA's approach to biofuels

2009-08-10T20:40:40Z

On Friday, EPA released the findings of four independent peer-review panels that assessed the Agency's approach to measuring the lifecycle GHG emissions of different types of biofuels. All of the reviewers agreed that emissions from land-use change is an important impact from biofuels that we cannot afford to ignore. While the reviewers offered lots of helpful recommendations, they also broadly praised the quality of EPA's efforts. And while some reviewers ultimately concluded that EPA's models are not yet ready to be used in regulations, the majority endorsed EPA's basic approach.

The reviewers looked at the combination of models EPA used, the timeframe EPA used, EPA's use of satellite imagery to determine land-use trends, and the emissions factors EPA used for international agriculture.

On the models the reviewers basically supported EPA's coupling of a pair of partial equilibrium models. While Dr. Michael Wang of Argonne National Lab agreed that the type of models should not be a problem he did raise concerns about transparency. On the other hand, John Sheehan at University of Minnesota and formerly at NREL stated: “EPA has, at this time, used the best available tools and approaches for assessing indirect land-use change effects of biofuels.”

On the timeframe, all of the reviewers agreed that EPA needs to shift from discounting time to discounting impacts. Dr. Kenneth Richards from University of Indiana raised some of the toughest questions about the ability of EPA's choice of a timeframe to be scientifically validated, but also stated: "I was pleased to see the extent to which EPA’s analysts had grasped both the conceptual and practical issues related to this type of work."

All of the reviewers assessing EPA's use of satellite imagery to predict land-use change patterns agreed that this was a scientifically valid approach and they all called for improvements over time such as more validation against local and regional ground truth.

EPA got the most general support for its assessment of international agriculture emissions. Dr. Kenneth Cassman from the University of Nebraska struck a common note when he said: “I believe the analysis uses the best available database for this analysis, and I do not know of any other data source.”

Unfortunately, the corn ethanol industry continued its campaign to suppress the science. Growth Energy, the newbie industry association set up by Poet, took a hear no evil approach and only focused on the portion of the comments that Growth agrees with. RFA and the National Corn Growers, unfortunately, must have decided that their attacks on the science had failed and so they should attack the messenger. They launched ad hominem attacks against the reviewers. (Here's RFA's and here's NCGA's.) Their logic seems to be that because there weren't any paid lobbyists for the industry on the review panel, it couldn't possibly be scientifically valid.

There's some irony here. RFA's rant largely boils down to the claim that because the peer review panel included noted corn ethanol skeptic, Tim Searchinger, "this is a perversion of what the peer review process is supposed to achieve." So how did Tim get on the panel? He was picked by an independent third party, the consulting firm ICF International. (See this explanation from EPA.) I'm sure EPA staff were groaning when they saw Tim's name on the list, but they were following the rules of good independent review, and ICF picked Tim because he knows more than almost anyone else about the models and issues involved. So basically RFA is trying to claim that there's bad science here because the peer review panel wasn't politically gerrymandered to their satisfaction.

Bad biofuels politics make for strange bedfellows pressing for science

2009-07-22T15:48:52Z

What do Environmental Working Group, Friends of the Earth, Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and NRDC and nearly 42 other odd bedfellows have in common? We all want sound science rather than sloppy politics to dictate our biofuels policies. Two largely overlapping ad-hoc coalitions have started circulating letters around Capitol Hill pushing back on what they see as the runaway politics of conventional biofuels, especially corn ethanol.

Biofuels are often promoted because they can help revitalize poor rural communities, but it is the poor that will be hurt the most if we let biofuels pollute our air and climate and drive up food prices. This coalition has come together because we want sound science rather than special interests to determine our biofuels policies. We are here to push back against the runaway politics of corn ethanol.

To date there have been two sets of letters from this set of organizations that don't often see eye to eye. Both sets urge Congress and EPA to follow the science on key biofuels policies. The first set was circulated starting last week and addressed the issue of increasing the amount of ethanol that can be legally blended with gasoline. The second set circulated today, addressed the emissions from land-use change caused by biofuels.

In both cases, while the interests are diverse, the message is simple: Congress should not legislate the science and EPA should not short circuit its scientific standards. There's plenty of studies and analysis that suggests that so-called mid-level blends of ethanol and gasoline can damage some engines and pollution control systems and result in increased air pollution. Similarly there's peer-reviewed studies and regulatory proposals that suggest that biofuels can cause large GHG emissions through land-use change (and none--not one--that suggest otherwise).

Decisions on these important issues should be based on the best science, not political expediency. Ethanol blends should only be approved if rigorous, independent and verifiable testing proves such blends are safe from a public health perspective and for engine operations. (Here are the environmental community's comment to EPA urging them to reject a petition to allow mid-level blends based on the data that currently available.) Similarly, the lifecycle GHG emissions of biofuels (as with all fuels) should be based on the best science and appropriate regulatory rulemaking process.

See my earlier blogs about how entrenched ag interests are trying to use the climate bill to drive biofuels policy in this new destructive direction. As I mentioned in those blogs, not only do I think that these policies are bad for the environment, I think they're bad for the biofuels industry. They're just going to feed the growing perception that our biofuels policies are just subsidies for corn growers to produce dirty fuels. It's short-term thinking at its worst.

Nuclear energy folks are starting to sound a little shrill

2009-07-21T14:55:54Z

On Wednesday, the American Enterprise Institute will be holding a little pep rally for nuclear power. In the event description, they make the following standard disparaging remark about renewables, suggesting that nuclear is the option that can scale:

Yet renewable energy sources--often touted by policymakers as the panacea for resource scarcity and global warming--currently provide only 3 percent of the energy Americans consume. The role of nuclear power as a source of emissions-free electricity is often ignored.

What I find interesting about this typical analysis in the AEI energy pitch is that they deride renewables as being only a small percentage of total U.S. energy consumption and tout nuclear power as the solution; but if you compare all renewables including hydro to all nuclear as a percent of total energy consumption, renewables equals 7.3% compared to a whopping total of 8.5% for nuclear. And needless to say renewables is a much higher percentage of NEW energy supplies than is nuclear these days.

Check out this very nice graphic from EIA Annual Energy Review 2008:

Wise men saying smart things about biofuels and land use in Science

2009-07-17T22:48:43Z

In today's Science, David Tilman, Robert Socolow, Jonathan A. Foley, Jason Hill, Eric Larson, Lee Lynd, Stephen Pacala, John Reilly, Tim Searchinger, Chris Somerville, and Robert Williams join up to write a very helpful, clear-headed statement (summary, full version requires subscription) about not only the potential of biofuels, but also the importance of doing the right thing.

It starts with this:

In a world seeking solutions to its energy, environmental, and food challenges, society cannot afford to miss out on the global greenhouse-gas emission reductions and the local environmental and societal benefits when biofuels are done right. However, society also cannot accept the undesirable impacts of biofuels done wrong.

Not surprisingly given Tim Searchinger's involvement, it includes strong statements about the risks of land-use change such as this:

Sometimes, the most profitable way to get land for biofuels is to clear the land of its native ecosystem, be it rainforest, savanna, or grassland. The resulting release of carbon dioxide from burning or decomposing biomass and oxidizing humus can negate any greenhouse-gas benefits of biofuels for decades to centuries ( 16– 20). Decisions regarding land for biofuels can have adverse consequences far beyond the land directly in question. For example, if fertile land now used for food crops (such as corn, soybeans, palm nuts, or rapeseed) is used to produce bioenergy, this could lead, elsewhere in the world, to farmers clearing wild lands to meet displaced demand for crops. In this way, indirect land-use effects of biofuels can lead to extra greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and higher food prices.

(By the way, Searchinger has a helpful new white paper on why the uncertainty around indirect emissions doesn't justify ignoring them. Among the other smart points it makes is that if, as some argue, biofuels such as corn ethanol won't have any impact on food supplies, then they don't provide any GHG benefits because the carbon that the corn absorbs would have been absorbed anyway, so the corn ethanol isn't causing any new absorption. So you basically have to assume indirect effects if you want to argue that corn ethanol can have any climate benefit. Check it out. It really deserves its own post.)

Similarly, given Lee Lynd's involvement, it's not surprising to find constructive statements such as this:

Three steps should be taken: meaningful science-based environmental safeguards should be adopted, a robust biofuels industry should be enabled, and those who have invested in first-generation biofuels should have a viable path forward.

Even the policy recommendations are right on:

Biofuels should receive policy support as substitutes for fossil energy only when they make a positive impact on four important objectives: energy security, greenhouse-gas emissions, biodiversity, and the sustainability of the food supply. Performance-based policies are needed that provide incentives proportional to the benefits delivered. Legislation that is vague could allow significant portions of the biofuels industry to develop along counterproductive pathways. Complementary policies must directly target related goals, such as land- and water-efficient food production, reduced agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and the prevention of habitat loss from land-clearing

This is a group of extremely smart people (some of whom I'm honored to count as friends), and their statement is a breath of fresh air after some of the unfortunate stuff coming out of the mouths and pens of some of our elected officials. (Such as this from Sen. Harkin: "We want no indirect land use, things like that in there -- there is no scientific basis for that.") A bit of wisdom is a good way to start the weekend.

A Power Lunch of Algae, Exxon and me on CNBC

2009-07-14T20:10:21Z

So Exxon announced a $600 million investment in algae biofuels today. The company reported profits over $45 billion last year, and this investment will be spread out over 5 or 6 years. Furthermore, half of it will go for in house research. So it's safe to say that this one annoucement may just be greenwashing and certainly doesn't change Exxon's reputation as the most polluting company on earth.

Given that, why did I tell CNBS's Power Lunch that it was a good type of investment for Exxon to make and the right direction for energy companies to be heading? Check out the video clip below to hear my answer.

Climate Bill moves to Senate, but can biofuels be saved?

2009-07-07T18:27:27Z

The day I went on vacation (June 26th), the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill. It was an exciting way to kick off a break but came with the bitter-sweet knowledge that concessions wrung by Rep. Collin Peterson and entrenched big-ag threaten to turn biofuels into dirty fuels and our biofuels policies into bad ag subsidies that make global warming worse.

Today in the Senate, my colleague Dave Hawkins is testifying before the Energy and Public Works Committee and will be outlining the urgency of moving forward and addressing eight key strengths and eight key improvements that are needed as the Senate takes up ACES. (You can find his testimony here.) NRDC's president, Frances Beinecke also has a blog today focusing specifically the three biofuels related fixes that the Senate needs to address. I want to put a fine point on one of these.

Peterson forced Waxman and Speaker Pelosi to prohibit EPA from including GHG emissions from international indirect land-use change for at least 5 years when determining if biofuels actually reduce global warming pollution compared to oil as required under the renewable fuel standard. As Hawkins said today: "If EISA’s requirement for full life-cycle analysis is postponed, then NRDC believes it is necessary to delay further implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard as well."

In other words, if we can't tell whether the biofuels being mandated by the RFS2 are actually reducing global warming pollution or are actually worse than oil, Congress should suspend the RFS2 entirely. A commenter on my last post put it well when he said:

...[L]et's at least be evenhanded: repeal the current law's 36 billion gallon biofuels mandate during that evaluation period. After all, biofuels proponents are repealing the safeguards that accompanied that mandate. First, let's do no harm, because who could be against good science and process particularly when the stakes of the climate are so high?

I wrote about this deal before the vote. There are a few minor saving graces: Waxman and Peterson filed letters with Speaker Pelosi and President Obama indicating that their deal was just a deal for getting the bill passed indicating that we can count on Waxman to fight again when the bill comes back for House-Senate conference. Also the prohibition is just for indirect land-use emissions outside the country of origin meaning that domestic land-use change emissions will continue to be included as will indirect emissions from non-land changes (e.g. fertilizer use). But to give a sense of how damaging this requirement to use faulty carbon accounting is consider the following table from EPA proposed RFS2 rule (large PDF) (excerpted from Table VI.C.1-1):

The international land-use change is the largest single source of pollution associated with biofuels (corn ethanol specifically in this case). There's lots of room for valid debate about the methodology for calculating these emissions, but by 2015, the RFS would force us to use 9.4 billion gallons more of biofuels than we'll use this year (about double what we used last year), and by 2022 the RFS will reach 36 billion gallons.

As I wrote about early last year, the when the EU decided to take its time accounting for emissions from land-use change, they also lowered their biofuels targets. If we're not going to use the best available science, we need to stop requiring more and more biofuels until we can get them right.

Deal in the House moves climate bill, breaks the RFS

2009-06-24T23:50:08Z

Yesterday, Representatives Waxman and Peterson announced that they have reached a deal that secures Peterson's support for the climate bill. Outlines of the deal are still coming out, but it clearly implements a five year delay in accounting for emissions biofuels related to international indirect land-use change. During the delay, EPA and USDA are to commission a study on ILUC and how to account for it. After the study, ILUC would be part of the RFS enforcement again, but only if EPA and USDA can agree on a methodology. It also puts the USDA in a lead on ag related offsets and seeks input from the Administration on the appropriate roles for EPA and USDA, though Waxman and Paterson appear to have agreed to continue to negotiate on this issue after the House passes the bill to influence a Senate bill and conference. We're also worried that the deal will still be expanded to allow destructive sourcing of biomass from our most sensitive landscapes.

The climate bill is the most significant piece of environmental legislation every voted on by an order of magnitude just in terms of its scope and the amount of money that it will reinvest in lower-carbon technologies. (And all you loyal readers that care about stopping global warming should go to our action page and take action to support the bill.) Chairman Waxman is apparently doing what he feels necessary to move forward with putting the firm limit on carbon pollution this country urgently needs. The shame is that the biofuels industry made the price of progress a denial of science--a move that could lead to more dirty fuels and risks further undermining the public's confidence in biofuels.

NRDC strongly supports the requirement in current law to consider all the impacts of producing biofuels. If biofuels are to become an accepted part of our energy future, Congress should not gag EPA from telling the truth about which biofuels are climate winners and which are losers.

A delay in full lifecycle accounting combined with a weakening in the biomass sourcing safeguards poses a grave risk to forests and wild lands around the world. I wrote about this recently--we need to understand that we cannot add the demand for 36 billion gallon of biofuels to our landscape--a demand equal to our annual average timber harvest for the two decades--without huge costs unless we have serious safeguards.

Agricultural offsets can play an important part in our national climate protection strategy but EPA needs to be provided adequate authority to ensure that the offsets are of equivalent quality to emission reductions from covered emission sources.

In the meantime, it's time to recognize that the real threat to a robust biofuels industry is not a requirement for honest accounting and sustainable sourcing of biomass. The real threat is loss of public support for these programs due to well founded objections to fuels that without good rules of the road, lead to bulldozing of habitats, more water pollution, more smog forming pollution and, without truth in accounting, more global warming pollution too.

Calling on scientists and economists to help protect good science on biofuels

2009-06-23T20:52:42Z

As I've written about over the last few weeks (here and here), our ability to require biofuels to actually be better than oil is under intense attack in the context of the climate bill and also under the budget appropriations process.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is organizing a statement from scientists and economists in support of keeping our lifecycle analysis complete and based in the best science and analysis. In particular, we all need scientists and economists to weigh in in support of keeping emissions from indirect land-use in EPA's analysis and in our implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard.

Here's the link and here's their message.

UCS is organizing a statement from scientists and economists on behalf indirect land use. If you are a scientist or economist with relevant expertise, please consider signing. If you know others who would be interested, please send this along to them.

I thought you might be interested in signing a national scientists' statement that calls for national biofuels policies to account for biofuel pollution from land use change and other major sources of carbon emissions. Please join in signing today at:https://secure3.convio.net/ucs/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1759

If state, regional, and national policies track emissions from "seed to tailpipe" they could play a significant role in reducing global warming pollution from transportation fuels and spur a whole new generation of cleaner fuels. But these standards must use the latest peer-reviewed research to account for all major sources of global warming pollution in order to be effective.

Land use change that occurs indirectly as agricultural land expands to accommodate biofuel feedstocks is a major category of biofuel pollution. Increased demand for biofuels pushes up commodity prices, which can induce farmers around the world to convert lands into agriculture. Some industries, however, have suggested that these indirect land use change emissions should be excluded from all biofuels policies. Several leading scientists have joined in an appeal to their colleagues to speak in a unified voice on the urgent need to account for all major sources of emissions from biofuels.

If you go to the URL below you can review the details and sign on:

https://secure3.convio.net/ucs/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1759

The National Scientists' Statement on Land Use Change and Biofuels is open nationally to Ph.D. professionals at universities and research institutions, who have expertise relevant to the scientific and economic dimensions of climate change or of land use change, including research related to biofuels, agriculture, forestry, and land use patterns.

Will the biofuels industry hang itself in the climate bill?

2009-06-18T20:06:15Z

Last week I wrote about the danger of industry-backed changes to the Waxman-Markey climate bill that could, perversely, incentivize deforestation and increase global warming emissions. Comparing the current bill language to the drastically weaker alternative advocated by Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, House leaders face a relatively clear choice between bioenergy done right and bioenergy done wrong.

A Washington Post editorial yesterday reinforces the importance of that choice, arguing that "Congress must ensure that it does not give biomass suppliers incentives to produce a fuel that is barely better -- or that is perhaps worse -- than fossil fuels."

Last week, I told EPA the following at their public hearing on their proposed rule to implement the RFS (here's the full draft of my testimony, which I mostly but not entirely stuck to):

The 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels demand alone will require an amount of biomass roughly equal to our annual average timber harvest for the past two decades (15.5 billion cubic feet of green wood).

Given current trends in deforestation around the world, the history of forest conversion by our timber industry, and even recent trends in CRP enrollment, it is impossible to imagine adding this much new demand for biomass to our lands and not creating new pressure for conversion of our natural forests and grasslands.

The laws of supply and demand are not laws of physics, but as capitalists, we believe they are the laws that govern our markets. Only your regulation can keep this new demand from having a huge negative impact.(emphasis added)

Now the biofuels industry is pushing to gut both the biomass sourcing safeguards and requirement for full accounting of the GHG emissions from biofuels. This means that while we force American's to buy three and a half times more biofuels than they do today, we'll have no ability to protect our most sensitive forests or wildlife habitat and no ability to know if we're getting something that's actually better than gasoline or diesel. Basically the biofuels industry wants to put the market in overdrive, take the safety railings off and then blind EPA.

If they succeed, the renewable fuel standard should be suspended at least until the situation is fixed. It will be the worst irony if the biofuels industry succeeds in turning the biofuels backlash into its own coffin, but that's what they're pushing Peterson to do.