From Environmental Capital at the WSJ:
The law of unintended consequences strikes yet again.
Global plans to tackle climate change, from the Kyoto Protocol to the recently-passed Waxman-Markey bill, have a fatal flaw: They essentially encourage large-scale deforestation, which pretty much undermines the whole idea of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.
That’s the argument from a new paper published in Science today, written by Princeton University’s Tim Searchinger and others. The upshot? Clearing out forests to use the wood for bioenergy clearly has an environmental cost, but that’s simply not accounted for in an
y of the prevailing climate-change programs. Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade plan, and the House climate bill all treat bioenergy as carbon-neutral; nobody counts the effect of disappearing forests.
“Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy,”
DrMr. Searchinger told us. (Here’s a video interview with more on the paper.)...
The Renewable Fuels Association, the U.S. ethanol lobby, reacted quickly: “The real issue is not accounting tactics, but whether biofuels reduce GHG emissions compared to continued petroleum use. There is clear and substantial evidence that they do…RFA strongly agrees with the authors that natural ecosystems with high carbon storage—such as rainforest, peat soils, and other native lands—absolutely should not be converted to produce biofuel feedstocks…However, there is no credible evidence that positively links U.S. biofuels expansion to the conversion of these land types.”
Still, given that the Senate has plenty of horse-trading ahead of it as it searches for 60 votes for the climate bill, it can add one more chore to the “to do” list. The Environmental Defense Fund, longtime vocal advocates of a cap-and-trade bill, announced today they’ll work to find a fix for the bioenergy accounting error.
