Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
The Hill was alive with the sound of finger pointing and hand-wringing yesterday when I testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality about the RFS. (All the testimony including mine is available...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Yesterday, in a major step forward for biofuels policy, the Massachusetts governor, senate president, and speaker of the house jointly called for the adoption of a low-carbon fuel standard. The LCFS is a technology-neutral, performance based approach to reducing the...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Reviving the World's Oceans , Solving Global Warming
Today we pressed send on our written comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind project.The DEIS was prepared by the Mineral Management Service as part of the permitting process for the project....
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
A quick review of a Google news search for "ethanol" and "food" is instructive. Here's an excerpt of the results: Don't Blame Ethanol For Soaring Food PricesA Worsening Food CrisisCorn-Based Ethanol Tied to Higher Food CostsBiofuels under attack as world...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Two weeks ago, I wrote about some misguided claims by David Pimentel and what I saw as overly broad and overly pessimistic views on biofuels from cellulosic biomass by Tom Philpott. Last week, Tom paid my blog here a visit...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Today Shell and a small biofuels start-up called Virent announced their collaboration on "biogasoline." According to the press release (here's the link to the free press kit): Virent's BioFormingTM platform technology uses catalysts to convert plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
David Pimentel, writing earlier this week in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, continues to make his case against corn ethanol and biofuels more generally. Dr. Pimentel has made a name for himself by repeating old data that is out of line...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
So today is my birthday, and I have been struck dumb by a case of laryngitis. It seems somehow appropriate for someone who spends so much of his time talking. Of course at home, where I'm the lone male, nobody...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
The debate about biofuels has always been painted with a wide brush and bounced between extremes. One week there's a report that says crop A or conversion technology B is promising and everyone is gaga; the next week, some new...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
So the questions I've been getting today are do yesterday's Science articles mean that all biofuels are bad and that the recently passed RFS is going to harm the climate? The short answer is no and no. It remains relatively...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Two articles appearing today in Science Magazine make the risk of bad biofuels clearer than ever. The first article, "Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt," addresses the direct greenhouse gas emissions from growing biofuel feedstocks on land recently converted...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Today is a good day for stories about the world waking up to the complexities of getting biofuels right. This post by FarmPolicy is a great summary of EU biofuels with lots of good links. My sense is that is...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Today I testified before the Massachusetts Advanced Biofuels Task Force on what the state should do to promote biofuels. Here's my testimony, which boils down to encouraging them to adopt technology-neutral, performance-based policy and ideally adopt a low-carbon fuel standard....
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
At the Detroit Auto Show, GM announced its investment in a new cellulosic ethanol company called Coskata. The company's approach is to gasify biomass and then use microbes to convert the syngas to ethanol. A number of people have asked...
Posted by Nathanael Greene in Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
December's Science carried a wonderfully insightful letter from William Laurance from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. (Here's the link to the letter, if you have a subscription, or Climate Progress has pasted it in full here.) In the letter, Laurance...
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