The must, can and should of bioenergy
Posted March 5, 2010 in Moving Beyond Oil, Solving Global Warming
This little article focuses on my friend John Sheehan and his take on biofuels and land-use. He proposed reframing the issue in an interesting way:
"We need to not look at land use as a biofuels problem, we need to look at biofuels as (being part of) a mix of solving our land use problem," he said.
John's proposal makes me think of three questions that I was recently discussing with folks in Delft, the Netherlands, as part of the Global Sustainable Bioenergy Project. For the purpose of these questions let's define sustainability as encompassing hunger, economic security, climate, water, and biodiveristy. Lot's that one could add to that list, but it get's at a lot. Here are the three questions I've been thinking about:
- Given a global commitment to achieving some minimum level of sustainability by, say, 2050, is there a minimum amount of bioenergy that we must use?
- Given the same global commitment to a minimum level of sustainability by 2050, what's the maximum amount of bioenergy we can use?
- And if we committed to maximizing our global sustainability, what's the amount of bioenergy we should use?
I'm not going to try to answer these questions here, nor do I think I even come close to having the answers. That's what I think the GSB Project is all about. I'm heading down to Brazil in a few weeks to continue the discussion. If you have thoughts and ideas to add to the discussion, come to the meetings. Here's the schedule.Comments are closed for this post.
Comments
Russ Finley — Mar 7 2010 11:04 AM
"..Do we really know that we need to expand total agricultural land on a global scale to meet new biofuels demand? I would say we don't know the answer. There are so many things that influence how much land we use in agriculture.."
According to this article in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;327/5967/818?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=Langridge%2C+Peter&andorexacttitle=or&andorexacttitleabs=or&andorexactfulltext=or&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&fdate=2/1/2010&tdate=2/28/2010&resourcetype=HWCIT,HWELTR
"...to meet the recent Declaration of the World Summit on Food Security (3) target of 70% more food by 2050, an average annual increase in production of 44 million metric tons per year is required (Fig. 1), representing a 38% increase over historical increases in production, to be sustained for 40 years. This scale of sustained increase in global food production is unprecedented..."
I'd answer his question with two questions:
How does he plan to stop farmers of the world from expanding cropland? How will a demand for biofuels made from food help this situation?
I would not expect a university biofuels coordinator to consider the possibility that biofuels made from anything but true waste will/are accelerating the destruction of the biosphere and biodiversity.
Have fun in Brazil. I just got back from Argentina:
http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2010/02/esteros-del-ibera-buenos-aires.html