Martha Walden, Get on Board for the Climate
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has held cap and trade workshops this fall and invited advice from participants on how to achieve its 2030 goal of greenhouse gas reductions [GHG]. Cap and trade, of course, is the state’s strategy for nudging industries towards an ever descending cap on their emissions, but the players also get allowances that they can buy or sell or save. So the targeted emissions decrease is far from guaranteed. A lot of us are nervously watching CARB’s tightrope walk as it tries to balance lowering the boom with trying to keep industries happy enough to stay within state borders.
350 Humboldt, in league with Climate Action California, has deposited several rigorously researched suggestions into CARB’s suggestion box. Here is one compound piece of advice: stop exempting crop-based biofuels from cap and trade and stop subsidizing them. Overwhelming evidence shows that these industries do not help the climate or the environment.
Ethanol and biodiesel are two problematic examples. Corn ethanol has long been a poster child for the sheer perversity of pouring taxpayers’ money into a process that emits as much carbon as its end product is supposed to reduce. (The results of lifecycle analyses range from showing a small net reduction to a 27 percent increase.) The same is true of biodiesel, a term I use loosely to refer to renewable diesel as well. Soy oil leads in the US market as feedstock for biodiesel.
Twenty percent of arable land in the US is devoted to corn and soybeans that are processed for fuels. Twenty-two percent of synthetic fertilizer usage nationwide – made from natural gas – goes to growing corn and soybeans, not only causing GHG emissions but also ground and surface water contamination. Any nitrogen-rich fertilizer, synthetic or not, emits nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Corn and soybeans are also bombarded with pesticides. Raising these two crops uses a lot of water, an issue of increasing concern as aquifer levels drop.
When it comes to using farm land to grow fuel crops instead of food, perhaps the worst collateral damage is rising food prices. A World Bank study focusing on the increase in food prices between 2002 to 2008, attributed about 75 percent of that increase to cultivating biofuel crops instead of food. However, clearing forests and breaking new ground to cultivate biofuels causes GHG emissions to shoot up even higher and destroys habitat for people and wildlife.
All of these unintended consequences disappoint naive people such as myself who originally cheered the development of renewable biofuels. Without viable liquid fuels or gasses to replace fossil fuels, we are dependent on electrification for all of our energy needs. More options would be better. (Using less energy also rates highly in the solutions portfolio, but now I’m really being naive.)
We might get to somewhere we want to go if we could get the economics right for using cellulosic ethanol. That process utilizes tough woody feedstock such as many different types of agricultural waste and forest residues, or how about invasive ecosystem-damaging plants such as ivy? Wouldn’t that be great? But maybe not. Maybe success in the capitalist market place would require such a large scale that we’d end up cutting down forests to make way for ivy plantations in order to feed our relentless need for fuel.