Deal in the House moves climate bill, breaks the RFS
- Nathanael Greene
- Director of Renewable Energy Policy, New York City
- Blog | About
- Posted June 24, 2009 in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
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.
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Comments
tom koehler — Jun 24 2009 07:08 PM
Nathaniel - why would environmentalists such as you be against good science and process particularly when the stakes of the climate are so high? Indirect if done at all - needs to be done correctly - and needs more impartial science, not the kind of science that is driven by advocacy organizations with agendas. If in fact true about the bill this should give everyone a little breathing room to really study the facts instead of advocating "positions".
Red Desert — Jun 24 2009 09:00 PM
One of the reasons we want to prevent anthropogenic climate change is to protect habitat. If the climate bill encourages expansion of agriculture and agriculture destroys habitat, well--you can answer that. That palm plantations are destroying rain forest in SE Asia and corn cultivation is taking land out of conservation here is pretty clear, but perhaps not enough of a concern to stop it from happening. But if the new cultivation ends up putting more carbon in the air than was saved, it's not ironic, it's tragic.
Have you ever been to an industry seminar on wood products? Logging is good. It locks up all that carbon in the wood and sucks more out of the air when the forest grows back! Build that wood-framed addition onto your house, your sequestering carbon, it's practically an offset.
Brooke Coleman — Jun 25 2009 10:59 AM
Nathaniel,
This statement -- "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" -- is really too bad.
There are legitimate methodological questions being asked about this science; its application, its precision and its readiness for regulatory enforcement. And of course, this "science" is economic modeling, which has a notorious track record of being directionally inaccurate.
This does not have to become another ideological war between greens and ag. This is a long way from resolved.
Collin Maze — Jun 25 2009 11:25 AM
According Mr. Koehler and Mr. Coleman the time for reasonable evalualation of biofuels impacts that they seek, let'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?
R Brooke Coleman — Jun 25 2009 11:37 AM
Collin,
Why would we use more oil, which has a far worse direct effects number than most biofuels and bleeds our economy, while we figure this out?
Russ Finley — Jun 27 2009 01:42 AM
Tom,
Which of these researchers are you suggesting are members of advocacy organizations:
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/page3.html
Coleman above is clearly a member of an advocacy organization.
Coleman,
It's instructive to watch you accept without question any science that supports your paycheck but reject any that does not. You will never cede this argument, science be damned.
Corn ethanol publicists move from argument to argument, just as the global warming deniers have. They have dropped the argument that all biofuel increases will come from yield improvements. They have two new arguments. One is that oil creates enough indirect land impacts to nullify those of agriculture, which is utterly ridiculous, and the other is that because we can't accurately measure how much land corn ethanol is displacing we should discount the fact that it is displacing land--also ridiculous.
And oil does not have more "worse direct effects" numbers, whatever that is:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2976