Thursday, May 29, 2008
We can beat global warming
From the RoundTable blog
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Al Weed
Weed is chairman of Public Policy Virginia, a Charlottesville-based nonprofit working to empower citizens to engage their communities in responding to the challenge of climate change.
A good sign in the fight against global warming is the open debate about how we should respond to our own spoliation of the atmosphere. We are no longer arguing about who caused what, but now, and more urgently, how we can reverse the carbon tide.
Biofuels are powerful tools that will wean us from petroleum and usher in a greener future for generations to come. Some say there are no meaningful alternatives to fossil energy, as every substitute seems to be loaded with problems.
Yet, it is ethanol that takes the brunt of media vitriol. Week after week, the perils of corn-based ethanol are trumpeted. Today, however, researchers, some public officials and even farmers all understand that corn will not be the base for the long-term production of renewable fuels.
The role of other crops is often ignored in the effort to demonstrate the futility of a biofuel future based on corn. The potential for warm-season, native perennial grasses (switchgrass is one) is the focus of many who believe that we can find an environmentally sound renewable fuel on the world's farms.
One currently popular "debunking" of biofuels is a Time Magazine article by Michael Grunwald, "The Clean Energy Scam." With titles like this, what is the average person to think?
It is widely asserted that there is a shortage of arable land, and if the United States seeks to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2020 (President Bush's stated goal), much of the world will go hungry.
We can make that goal from cellulosic ethanol at the foreseeable production rates of 10 tons of warm-season grasses to the acre, and 100 gallons to the ton, using only the 35 million acres of idle land in the nation's conservation reserve (the land we pay farmers not to plant). No food production would be displaced.
The biofuel skeptics note that corn ethanol produces only 25 percent more usable energy than its production consumes. Yet, University of Nebraska studies show that an energy premium of 500 percent is possible from cellulosic crops. The ethanol refineries now in place will be needed to process these water-saving and carbon-sequestering grasses.
The reality that Grunwald and others ignore is that we are indeed a global economy. The rise in oil prices from both demand in India and China, as well as the leveling off of supply due to "peak oil," will inevitably lead to markets seeking alternatives.
Some recent writers, Grunwald included, suggest that we'd be better off just burning gasoline and farming for food. Yet, increased Third World prosperity (a good thing, to be sure) and the consequent demand for more protein are putting more pressure on cropland for food than for biofuels. In fact, no one can really be sure which the greater culprit is.
Great progress is being made in yields of environmentally sound grasses. A Washington State University research project has increased switchgrass yields on test fields to from 5 tons to 30 tons per acre. Research into butanol, a carbon-based alcohol that can be made from the same feedstocks as ethanol, is promising. Butanol is more efficient than ethanol, can be transported in gasoline pipelines and can be produced with a much higher energy premium. Butanol can be burned at 100 percent in all gasoline engines without any modifications and will reduce air pollution from hydrocarbons by 95 percent.
On the global scale, a commitment to renewable energy will create jobs and new prosperity in every rural community. Cleaner energy will improve worldwide health and productivity. Farmers will have cash to invest in modern technology and increase yields of both food and fuel crops.
Key to this global effort is preserving arable land for its most effective carbon-reducing uses and limiting population pressure on that finite resource. In Virginia alone, we are losing 45,000 acres of farmland to new, permanent residential and commercial uses each year. That amount of land could produce the equivalent of 115 million gallons of gasoline. That is about 3 percent of Virginia's annual gasoline consumption -- every year.
As this debate goes forward, it is vital that all the facts are laid out and that we remain confident that climate change can be arrested. If the public sees only the negative and gives up caring, the price of global warming will not be paid by this generation in its SUVs and air-conditioned McMansions, but by our children and their children, who will face the costs of life changed dramatically by global warming.
